Part Five: The Perils of Paul, The Pangs of Pauline

from the frontiers of sex and science, an unprecedented playboy series on what makes man man and woman woman

male aggression? female depression? scientists are finding answers to these and other behavioral questions--answers that may set psychiatry back 100 years

The back pages of the paper contain some amazing items these days: There's almost always something such as "Gene Found for Depression"; "Criminal Behavior thought to be Inherited"; "Murderess Acquitted: Psychiatrist Points to Premenstrual Tension"; "Brain Chemical Tied to Schizophrenia." And: "Is there a Gene for Math?"

We read the items separately, not seeing how they hang together. And so we fail to realize that, buried in those small headlines, there is a revolution going on--a revolution that will soon change, once and for all, the way we think about human behavior. That revolution involves everything we have written about in the past three articles: evolution, genes, sex hormones, abilities--the separate inheritances of men and women--and something more, the chemistry of the two hemispheres of their brains. And it takes us far out, to the leading edge of the science of men and women. Right at the edge, there are few landmarks, few things known for sure. But such landmarks as there are have already prompted one scientist to say, with some glee, "This research has probably set psychiatry back 100 years." And another has been encouraged to suggest that "culture, personality and brain chemistry are really the same. They're just different ways of viewing the same thing."

What does that mean for men and women? It means that at precisely the time we're most avidly rushing to psychiatrists and other practitioners of the spirit, science is quietly announcing that the game is off, a new die is cast, the rules have changed. We're not the purely "psychological" creatures we thought we were, fraught with psychological problems that, if they are to be cured, demand psychological understanding. Instead, we are the creatures, to an extent not yet fully known, of biological forces. Our mood disorders, our madness and, perhaps, even our crime are biological in both origin and expression--in the brain. That goes for not only the major problems that bedevil this society--the one percent of people who suffer from schizophrenia, the five percent who are crippled by illnesses of mood, the two percent who commit almost all of the crime and the billions of dollars such aberrations cost each year. It goes for the minor problems that bedevil our families and our relationships--the mood swings of parents, the hyperactivity and aggressiveness of children, the come-and-go depressions of women and the irritability and instability of men. At the mysterious heart of all these things lies biology--set up by the genes, mediated by the sex hormones and expressed in a different chemistry in the ultimate home of our personality, our brain.

For the moment, then, forget psychology--all the assumptions you've learned about a mind that you inhabit and that you alone can control. Ignore the effects of the environment on who you are and the way you behave. Fix your gaze, instead, on the biological and genetic core of yourself, as a member of one sex of the human species--differently made, differently programed, differently wired and with a different chemical design, differently "juiced," as one scientist recently put it. For, if you do, you'll begin to see why the small newspaper headlines combine into a radically new view of men and women. You'll begin to piece together the causes of many of the misunderstandings and tensions between us. And you'll begin to understand, as science is just beginning to, why the bewildering strengths and weaknesses of each one of us, man and woman, seem to came packaged together. Why a woman's immune system is superior to a man's but more likely to attack the body it's supposed to protect. Why men, in general, are superior in math reasoning but are much more likely to be sexual deviants or psychopaths. Why women are strong in areas of communication but are preferentially attacked by phobias and depression. And why there are more males at both ends of the intellectual spectrum--more retardates but also more geniuses.

If you think that psychiatrists, psychologists and all those who've made a professional commitment to the effects of the environment will be horrified by this altered gaze of yours, you're right. But if you think that their spiritual father, Sigmund Freud, would be equally horrified, you're wrong. Freud treated all sorts of personalities and disorders, among them psychosomatic illnesses, schizophrenia, hysteria and depression. And he said many times that despite all his theories, one day a "constitutional predisposition" would be found to be responsible for our problems. "A special chemism," he predicted, would be discovered at their heart. And he was right. By inference and indirection, such a chemism has been found at the core of our nature as men and women. And we are at the beginning of a road through that chemism that will lead us to a full explanation of why we are differently gifted, differently protected and differently at risk. For the complete story, you'll have to wait 20 years or so; 20 years marked--if one can judge by present signs--by controversy, battle, arguments about free will and radical new approaches to education, health and the treatment of violence, mood and madness. In the meantime, here are the landmarks--and the paths that science is tracing between them.

An Affair of the Heart

Let's start with heart disease and heart attacks. Forty million Americans have some form of heart disease, and this year, about 1,500,000 will have heart attacks. The majority in both categories are men. "Ah-ha!" the men among you will no doubt say. "That's the environment. That's stress. Just wait until the same number of women go out into the world and start pulling the same weight that we do. They'll soon be dropping like ninepins from the effects of stress, just as we are."

Sorry, guys. That's almost certainly untrue. The connections between the stresses of the brain and the problems of the heart aren't well understood--and that's something you'll have to remember throughout this article, that science knows not a lot but very little. From what science does know, however, three things stand out. First, working women are healthier, in general, than their nonworking sisters. Second, women are protected against the most common form of heart disease by their primary sex hormones, the estrogens. And, third, they seem to respond to stress--both chemically and behaviorally--quite differently from men.

Human responses to stress are mediated by a group of brain structures known to control emotion and what scientists fondly call "the four Fs"--feeding, fleeing, fighting and . . . sex. Those structures direct the body's immediate responses to danger--the accelerated heartbeat, the heightened senses, the rush of adrenaline, the raised blood pressure, the preparation for a quick burst of energy. During stress, the hormonal mechanisms by which they do this become more or less continuously activated. A little stress isn't bad for you--it's a necessary part of life and it may, indeed, be pleasurable. But, in the long term, it can have several nasty effects. It can make the body less resistant to infections and, conceivably, to certain forms of cancer. (The dim connection between stress and the defensive immune system should be borne in mind for later.) It can cause heart disease, because the heart, among other things, is forced to work too hard. And it can so excite a center high in the brain that the heart is sent by it into a fatal overdrive--a fibrillation, a full-blown attack. Whether or not those things happen seems to depend on the individual's genetic make-up.

But it also depends on gender. So-called Type-A people--who have a chronic urgency about time and are hard-driving, competitive, extroverted and aggressive--are said to be particularly at risk from the damaging effects of stress. But it's now beginning to appear that this is true of only Type-A males. Studies in Sweden have recently shown that Type-A females, when solving work-related problems, simply don't show the increase in heart rate, blood pressure and adrenaline flow that Type-A males do. Even when their over-all health picture is the same, they don't have as many heart attacks.

That doesn't mean, of course, that women aren't responsive to stress. It simply means that their chemistry is different in some way. They seem to find different things stressful, and they seem to react in a different way to the stress in their environment. If there is a word that can sum up this difference in their make-up, it's emotion. Women tend to be put into stress by the emotional coloration of their lives--not by paper problems but by people and communication problems. And when they experience setback, failure or emotional pressure, they don't go into overdrive the way men do. They respond emotionally or fall back into depression. You may not like that, ladies, but it's probably a good thing. It certainly doesn't cause as much wear and tear on the body.

The next question is, Why should there be that over-all difference? And the answer is really anybody's guess. It probably has to do with the different evolutionary pressures that affected the development of men and women--men, the hunters and competitors for sex, were more likely to need elaborate stress mechanisms in the presence of danger; and women, the nurturers and centers of social groups, were more likely to need fine-tuned emotional responses and skills. Depression and the effects of continuous stress may be the different prices men and women pay for those legacies--an integral part of our maleness and femaleness.

That that is true--at least for poor males--is suggested by a few pieces of evidence. Scientists working with male laboratory animals have shown that dominance (sexual success and the successful maintenance of a large piece of turf) is associated with high blood pressure and hardening of the arteries, telltale signs of the effects of stress. But they've also found that the animals at the top of the heap have high levels of testosterone, the hormone most essential to maleness. The plot thickens. For it's testosterone that makes hardening of the arteries such a problem in human males. It causes the production of a liver protein that ties up cholesterol in the arteries' lining, causing the formation of fat deposits called plaques. The bigger those plaques, the more difficulty the heart has in pumping blood. The more difficulty the heart has, the greater the risk of heart disease.

Findings of this sort are, again, only landmarks in an otherwise empty landscape. But they make it plain that in stress, behavior, emotion, genes, sex hormones, the body and the brain are all interlinked. And they point the way toward the discovery of a more general connection between emotions and disease, the brain and the immune system. For the moment, there are only a few curious straws in this area. Laboratory animals, for example, don't get the hardening of the arteries scientists try to inflict on them if they're handled a lot--if they're loved. And married people are generally happier and healthier than unmarried ones. They have less heart disease. So it goes.

From the Heart to the Head: An Affair of the Intellect

Having left the men among you deeply worried about an area in which you seem to be at a disadvantage, let's turn the tables on the women--let's move upstairs to an area in which women seem to be at a disadvantage. It, too, involves anxiety, and it involves an ability--mathematical-reasoning ability. Is that, too, part of a special chemism?

"There you go again," you women will no doubt say. "Everyone knows that's the environment. Girls are taught from the beginning that math is for boys. They're given no encouragement. They have no role models, no expectations, no self-confidence and no support. And a lot less is demanded of them. It's no wonder that they become anxious about math. And it's no wonder that (continued on page 180) Man and Woman (continued from page 162) they seem to be less good at it than boys."

Sorry, ladies. But that, too, is almost certainly untrue--and it surely isn't the end of the story. Do you begin to see how controversial this theorizing about the differences between men and women can get? Johns Hopkins' Camilla Persson Benbow and Julian Stanley most assuredly do. Three months after those scientists merely suggested that there might be real, "endogenous" differences in math ability, they were seen at a conference looking pale and haggard--drained by the often-unreasonable attacks launched against them in the wake of their December 1980 report.

"You have to understand," Benbow says softly, with a distant trace of a Scandinavian accent, "that we didn't start out looking for sex differences in mathematical ability. The Johns Hopkins Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth--S.M.P.Y.--simply conducted six talent searches in the mid-Atlantic states between 1972 and 1979. We were looking for gifted seventh and eighth graders who, though they hadn't usually been taught any higher mathematics, could still manage a very high score on the math part of the Scholastic Aptitude Test--a test designed for bright, college-bound high school seniors. What we were looking for, in other words, was a natural aptitude for mathematical reasoning. We found about 10,000 children in those six years.

"But we also found something that rather shocked us: There were more boys than girls among our kids. On the average, the boys scored much higher than the girls. And on no occasion was a girl tops on the test. Well, we were bound to ask why. So we studied the boys and girls on every variable available that could possibly account for the discrepancy--preparation in mathematics, liking for math, the encouragement given them, and so on. And we could find no difference at all--except the one in over-all ability, mathematical-reasoning ability. Since 1979, we've looked at another 24,000 children and have found the same sex difference in ability. And we've conducted a nationwide talent search for children at the top end of the scale. We found 63 boys--and no girls."

Benbow, a striking woman in her mid-20s, is clearly still surprised, a year after the publication of her and Professor Stanley's paper, by the controversy it generated. She's reluctant to say that the chemistry governed by the sex chromosomes is at the root of that sex difference, and she would love, she says, to find an environmental difference that has been overlooked, to find it and correct it. But she quotes a follow-up study completed on a group of girls who were specially taught and specially encouraged. And even that, she says, seems to have made no ultimate difference. At the root, still, is the difference in mathematical-reasoning ability. When the time comes for girls to use it formally in class--in calculus, differential equations and analytical geometry, for example--they seem to fall even further behind the boys, even when they're gifted and have no anxiety about the subject.

"All this," says Benbow carefully, "suggests that there may be a biological basis to the difference, after all. And, if so, then it's likely to be connected to the male's right-hemisphere superiority in visual-spatial tasks. You see, females tend to use their stronger left hemisphere--their superior verbal skills--in their approach to problems. I know I do. And there's a certain level at which the verbal approach is inefficient in math--look at the way mathematicians are forced to talk to one another, via symbols on a blackboard. Now, that approach may be something that actually suits males. From the beginning, they're less verbally oriented than females--more oriented to things, to objects in space. They're less dependent on context. They're more abstract.

"This may help explain, too, I think, why men are overrepresented in certain disciplines in science--something we've also been studying. To be a good physicist or engineer, for example, requires not only mathematical-reasoning ability but also skill in three-dimensional visual imagery. And that probably makes most women unfit. To be a good scientist at all, in fact, seems to require a set of qualities more characteristic of men than of women--spatial ability, independence, a low social interest and an absorption in things. Let's face it, human males like to manipulate things--from Tinkertoys to the cosmos." She laughs. "Females are more dependent, more communicative, more sensitive to context and more interested in people. Perhaps that's why there are so many women in psychology. Like me."

How mathematical-reasoning ability and stress are interconnected may not be clear at first sight. There are, however, a number of threads that do, in fact, connect them. One can be seen intuitively, at the level of personality and problem solving: independence versus interdependence; absorption in abstract problems--things--versus absorption in people; fixated men versus emotional, communicative and less stress-prone women. Another can be seen at the level of the sex hormones. For from various bits and pieces of evidence, men's superior visual-spatial--and, hence, math--ability seems to be related to their testosterone, just as are a number of their problems in stress. Chemism lies at the heart of both and, therefore, may explain why there have been many more male composers and painters--not to mention architects and town planners--in history. Hormones, visual-spatial ability, application, abstraction. For every strength, there is weakness, though. Visual-spatial men are better organized on the right side of their brain, verbal women on the left. But they are both comparatively weak on the side where the other is strong.

That fact takes us deeper into the differences between us. It takes us to the embattled core of our civilization. To crime. To mood. To sudden changes in personality. To madness. And to the problems of our children.

A Tale of two Hemispheres

If you've ever given a party for four-and-five-year-olds (or even 11-and-12-year-olds), you may remember that you've known instinctively that girls develop faster and are more mature than boys. They're less shy, more verbal and readier to join the group. They have puberty earlier. And, until then--to use a favorite Monty Python phrase--they're "allround less weedy." The reason, as you probably sensed at the time, has nothing to do with environment or with the circumstances of your party. It is that boys, from the beginning, are more precarious--an altogether more iffy proposition--than girls.

To begin at the beginning: Sperm carrying the male sex chromosome seem to swim faster and have more staying power than sperm carrying the female sex chromosome. That's good. And between 120 and 140 males are conceived for every 100 females. Also good. From there on in, though, it's downhill all the way. More males are spontaneously aborted during pregnancy, and although they retain a slight edge at the time of birth--106 to 100--the decline continues. (continued on page 206) Man and Woman (continued from page 180) More males than females are born dead. Thirty percent more males than females die in the first months of life. And 70 percent of all birth defects are associated mainly with males. The result is that by the time of puberty, the head start achieved by the male sperm has been lost. And the population of men and women has become about equal--at a considerable cost to males.

The reason is, again, anybody's guess. Some sociobiologists say it has to do with the higher value of the male in a polygamous species. Whatever the ultimate cause, though, there is an immediate one much nearer to hand. For the fact is, the male has to go through many more elaborate transformations in the womb than the female. More can go wrong (see Man and Woman, Part Four: The Sex Chemicals), so more males die in the womb. And, as a result of all the hormonal toings-and-froings to which they're exposed, they are born less mature, less sturdy and less ready for the world than girls. Like all premature babies, they're more at risk after birth--both in the body and in the brain.

For example, the slightest brain damage--occurring during or after birth--has a far more debilitating effect on boys than it does on girls. What's more, it virtually always strikes boys in the hemisphere in which they're less well organized--the left. It's not male visual-spatial abilities, secure in their right hemisphere, that suffer. It's language skills and language controls, in the left. Boys' left hemisphere, in other words, faces a sort of double indemnity. And the result is that they're four or five times as likely to suffer from language disorders and disabilities as any girl. Boys are more likely (five to one) to stutter when the left hemisphere loses control during speech. They're more likely to be autistic (four to one), often with a complete absence of left-hemisphere language. They're more likely to be what's called an idiot savant (figures unknown)--language-damaged and incapacitated but with some narrow, brilliant mathematical skill. (Ah-ha!) And boys are more likely to suffer from two so-called developmental disorders: aphasia, or extreme difficulty learning to talk (five to one); and dyslexia--extreme difficulty with reading and writing (up to six to one). Nelson Rockefeller had dyslexia, so we know the company's good. And, recently, Albert Galaburda of Boston's Beth Israel Hospital found direct evidence that at least one type of dyslexia is caused by early language-area brain damage--damage, when it happens in girls, that has less effect on their more developed and better organized left hemisphere.

But hang on, guys--your problems with your left hemisphere only start here. And those problems strike, in a very mysterious way, right to the heart of the male personality. Men commit almost all the violent crime, and the so-called antisocial personality at the root of most of it seems to be caused by poor functioning of the left hemisphere. Men are the sexual deviates--the pedophiles, the fetishists, the exhibitionists and the homosexual sadists. Here, too, something has gone wrong with the way the left hemisphere governs behavior. For all the other problems that afflict men and boys much more than they do women and girls, it's almost certainly the same old left-hemisphere story. Hyperactivity, alcoholism, mania and early-onset schizophrenia: left hemisphere. And if you think those things don't concern you personally, you're wrong. Hyperactivity, for example, affects more than 2,000,000 boys in this country. It's not a problem that is, by any means, always outgrown--hyperactive children often grow up to become alcoholics or child abusers, hot-tempered, aggressive and unable to keep a job. As for schizophrenia, you should know this: For every full-blown schizophrenic in this society, there are between three and ten more walking around with lesser but related disorders.

Your first reaction to that news may be, "Yes, but that really is the environment, isn't it? That's too many toys, too much stimulation. It's diet. It's a terrible home. It's crazy parents. It's a bad upbringing." Unfortunately, it simply isn't that easy. That it isn't brings us right back to the special chemism we've been talking about all along, the chemistry that distinguishes man and woman. First, those largely male disorders can't be cured by psychiatric hand-holding methods--"understanding" the patient's problem or the environment that "caused" it. Second, the only therapy that ultimately works on such disorders is the use of drugs or antihormones that alter the chemistry of the brain. And, third, for all those abnormalities, scientists have recently found just what Freud predicted for his "mental" illnesses--a constitutional predisposition, a genetic element.

"The genetic studies," says psychiatrist Pierre Flor-Henry, "have looked not just at how much these things run in families. They've looked at identical twins. And--most important--they've looked at what happens in adoption. Is a child, adopted early, more likely to follow the pattern of his real parents than the pattern of his adoptive parents--in crime, hyperactivity, schizophrenia, and so on? The answer is yes, he is. It's not just the environment, then. Nature, a predisposition, is at work in some way we don't yet fully understand. Equally important, there's also a connection between some of them, a genetic connection. For example, alcoholism, hysteria and antisocial personality seem to cluster in the same families."

Flor-Henry is a slight, dapper Franco-Hungarian in his 40s: clinical professor at the University of Alberta, director of admission services at the Alberta Hospital and a man who spends much of his research time trying to pull together into one over-all picture all that is now being discovered about the two brain hemispheres, the chemistry and the disorders of men and women. "There's not much to go on," he says. "We still know so little. But genes are responsible for the body's chemistry. So the predisposition is a chemical one, perhaps triggered into expression by damage of some kind or by an event or series of events in the world. It's not guaranteed. But the damage or the events, if they happen, may preferentially affect and alter the chemical organization, in males, of their brain's weaker left hemisphere.

"And the genetic defect then comes into its own, resulting in behavior that's deranged or unstable in one way or another. The behavior--and the brain--can then be treated only with drugs that, either directly or indirectly, put the left hemisphere back into balance. In schizophrenia, that involves drugs affecting the supply of a brain chemical called dopamine. In hyperactivity, it involves drugs that affect the dopamine supply in a reverse direction. In sexual deviance--and, perhaps, in antisocial personality, violent crime, it involves drugs that block the action of the main male sex hormone."

If you men are thinking that your comparative left-hemisphere weakness makes you a variable, deviant, hit-or-miss sex, then you're right. Nature doesn't seem to have taken out much insurance on you--especially where the social and verbal left hemisphere is concerned. You are less well protected against your own excesses, just as in stress. If it's any consolation. Flor-Henry believes it's because you evolved as the sex-seeking gender. He thinks that the human right hemisphere developed in such a way that visual-spatial skills were linked in it to mood, movement and sexual fulfillment. And because the male was the one to go after sex--rather than just being able to sit and wait for it--the organization of the male right hemisphere became particularly pronounced. Males became lopsided--they put all their eggs in the right-hemisphere basket. Females evolved in a more balanced way. Because females were the pursued rather than the pursuers, they were able to develop verbal skills and verbal controls in the left hemisphere that were much more stable, secure and efficient. That goes some way toward explaining why women tend not to become psychopaths and violent criminals. Women, remember, don't go into overdrive when under stress. They tend to become depressed. And their pattern of crime is quite different. They don't act out against people. Antisocial males, on the other hand, virtually always attack people. And Flor-Henry thinks they're out of control of the verbal and social left hemisphere. Instead, they're exaggerated, out-on-a-limb, right-hemisphere males using all their visual and spatial skills for aggression.

If this evolutionary dispensation seems profoundly unfair to you males, then all we can do is remind you of the delicate balance between strengths and weaknesses. In the words of an old joke, "With a Bernstein diamond comes the Bernstein curse." And the same rule goes for women. This time, though, they're at risk somewhere else--just where males are strong. In the right hemisphere.

Down in the Dumps

There are three things you can say with certainty about depressed people. One, they don't jump around. Two, they tend to lose all sexual interest. And, three, they're mostly women. Every year, 40,000,000 Americans suffer, to one degree or another, from depression. Two thirds of them are women.

Of course, you can sing the old song about the environment. "Girls are taught from the beginning not to express their anger. They turn their anger inward. When they become women, they find themselves in a rotten, male-dominated society. Men don't give them what they want. They stifle and ignore all women's emotional subtlety. No wonder women are depressed."

The last part of the song is probably true. And, of course, there are real environmental causes for depression. If you've set your heart on being a concert pianist and can't even manage Chopsticks, you're likely to be depressed. And if you've lost a father, mother, husband, wife, child or friend, you shouldn't be expected to be happy. But that still doesn't explain why so many more women than men are afflicted by a disorder that affects mood, movement and sex drive in their right hemisphere. And it certainly doesn't explain why, though nothing on the surface of a woman's life is wrong, she can suddenly be sent into a terrible tail spin. Psychological explanations of that sort of depression are useless, and such psychiatric treatment of it is, at best, a waste of money and of time--women may simply become even more entrenched in their despair. No, the only way to understand so-called vital depression (which women have to endure five times more often than men), as well as phobias (which cripple women at least twice as often), is through women's chemism--genes, hormones and brain chemistry. Again, it lies right at the heart of the female personality. And it can tell us a lot about the human female's emotional vulnerability, her more general swings in mood that break up relationships and leave men feeling left out, unsympathetic and confused.

"Depression and the phobias obviously hang together," says Flor-Henry. "They attack the hemisphere in which the organization of the female brain is more precarious--the right hemisphere. The phobias--they should be called the panics--are panics about heights, open and closed spaces, water, and so on. And they obviously have to do with mood, movement and visual-spatial skill--right hemisphere. The same things are affected in vital depression--plus, of course, sexual drive. Again, right hemisphere. There are two other things, too, that yoke them together. First, the only really effective treatment for both is with antidepressants--not Valium or Librium but two classes of drugs that have no effect at all, except maybe an unpleasant one, on normal people. And, second, both seem to involve a genetic predisposition, just as the predominantly male disorders do. Not much is yet known about the phobias. But work done in Belgium has shown that adopted children with depression are more likely to have that depression in common with their real parents rather than with their adoptive parents.

"So," says Flor-Henry, spreading his fingers on the table. "Genetic. Biological. Chemical. Right hemisphere. We don't know how those things interconnect. And we don't know how they relate to the milder forms of depression and mood disorder in women. My guess is, though, that all those things are part of one evolutionary package--affecting the weaker right hemisphere and involving the sex hormones."

The sex hormones--here they are again. They're somewhere at the core of a man's response to stress, and they're also at the heart of the chemistry of a woman's moods. The evidence isn't hard to find. It comes from routine parts of ordinary life--from puberty, childbirth, the menstrual cycle, menopause, the pill. And the upshot of it is this: Alter the level of a woman's sex hormones, in large or even in small ways, and she'll be likely to suffer from subtle and not-so-subtle changes in mood and personality. Sometimes, she'll no longer be in control of her own personality--her hormones will be.

We haven't space here to go into the problems of puberty and menopause, but you should know this: About seven percent of new mothers suffer for weeks, even months, from severe depression--complete with loss of sexual interest--at precisely the time when their hormone levels have been abruptly altered by the births of their children. And an unknown percentage of women on the pill report a bewildering variety of side effects, including lowered sex drive, irritability and, yes, depression. Those things are all too often looked on--by lover, husband, doctor, even the woman herself--as psychological in origin. Her responsibility. And they can lead to the breakup of relationships and marriages. How many new mothers have you known whose husbands left them within 15 months of the baby's birth?

Then there's premenstrual tension. Before you guys walk away or chuckle, you should know that you, too, may have your "time of the month"--that's how new this science is--and it may be marked by the same irritability and tension. If it exists, however, it seems also to be unpredictable and irregular. And that means that you'll have to abandon all your old assumptions about "women's problems." Who, after all, would you want doing skilled and responsible jobs--flying a plane, performing brain surgery, and so on? Someone whose switches in mood are predictable or someone whose switches in mood are unpredictable?

British psychiatrist Katharina Dalton believes that premenstrual tension affects four out of ten women to some extent, and for eight days--before and during menstruation--it seriously affects the life of one of those four. Being on the pill, says Dalton, actually makes the condition worse. Not only do the symptoms include brooding, lethargy, depression, loss of memory and emotional control; they also include, she says, an increased incidence of quarrels, accidents, suicides, baby battering and crime.

In November 1981, Dalton appeared in court as a witness for the defense of one of her patients, a 29-year-old English barmaid named Sandie Smith. You may have read about that case, for its implications haven't gone unnoticed by the press. Smith had had 30 previous convictions--for arson and assault, among other offenses--and she was already on probation for having stabbed another barmaid to death in 1980. This time, she was charged with threatening to kill a policeman. Dalton, however, was able to demonstrate that all her crimes were connected by a 29-day cycle--and by premenstrual tension. And Smith was given three years' probation.

The very next day, November tenth, the very same defense--premenstrual tension--was brought up by Dalton in the case of another woman, Christine English, who had had an argument with her lover and had run over him with a car. English was discharged--conditional for a year--after pleading guilty to manslaughter. The court ruled that at the time of her crime, she had "diminished responsibility."

Those are examples of where the new discoveries about the chemistry of men and women can lead, and there's no doubt that the same defense will soon be used in a case in the United States. It will call into question, in a public way, everything we now presume about personal responsibility and the effects of the environment. Is a woman suffering from premenstrual tension responsible for what she does? Is a man responsible for his reaction to stress? Is a male criminal responsible for his crimes or does the responsibility lie with his testosterone level and his lopsided brain organization?

These are revolutionary new questions. Revolutionary in law. Revolutionary in the home. Revolutionary in the way we think about ourselves and about one another. And if we are to find answers for them, we will have to think very carefully, not only about the chemistry of the brain but also about our place in nature and the way in which our biological evolution may now be at odds with our cultural evolution.

Take phobias, for example. They usually appear in women only during the childbearing years. And, you'll notice, they involve fears of everything that might have been dangerous in the environment in which we evolved--heights, open and closed spaces, water, snakes, and so on. Such phobias weren't a bad idea then--especially if you had to protect a child.

What about depression? Well, for most of our evolutionary history, isolated women could not survive. They had to be interdependent members of social groups. Indeed, they were the necessary glue that held those groups together. A woman's tendency to depression, then, may have been a mechanism that reinforced her interdependence and accelerated her back into the group by producing the cry for help. In today's society, of course, there aren't many close-knit social groups. There is a cry for help, but no help comes--and we have a major problem with depression.

Each one of the landmarks in this science of men and women brings us nearer to a picture of the whole landscape of ourselves. In 1981, for example, scientists located for the first time an actual gene that they think is involved in depression. And it's in a very odd place: It's either very close to or actually among a group of genes that govern the development of the human immune system--our defense against diseases. And it's the neighbor of a gene that's responsible, when expressed, for masculinizing female fetuses in the womb.

Maleness and femaleness, mental illness, hormones, hemispheres and diseases: This is the final mystery and our final port of call. What is there at the heart of our nature that gives us not only different strengths and weaknesses but a proneness to such different diseases? How can that be added to the picture?

From Head to Toe

One thing about organic diseases--they're physical, not "environmental." Either you get them or you don't. So there probably will be no complaints about this part of our story--except, perhaps, from you guys. Because here, again, you're at a disadvantage. You're just not as well protected as women. As if dying in the womb, being born "weedy" and maturing more slowly weren't enough, you're more likely to have inherited one of a whole rash of diseases from which the human female is shielded--including diseases in which your immune system doesn't work properly or hardly works at all. You're also generally more at risk from the whole sea of viruses and bacteria in which we swim.

The truth is, the male's immune system is just not as good as the female's. The reason (here we come to chemism again) has something to do with his Y sex chromosome and his main male sex hormone, testosterone. Little is known about this yet--there are few landmarks in this particular part of the landscape. But testosterone, when given from the outside, seems to act in all humans as a depressor of their immune system; estrogen, the female sex hormone, seems to have the reverse effect. Testosterone, too, is probably also responsible for the fact that men don't produce as much immune-globulin M--a blood protein important to the body's defenses--as women do. That is part of the reason men are more likely to contract such illnesses as hepatitis, respiratory ailments and legionnaire's disease. Estrogen seems to beef up production of immuneglobulin M--and it seems, in some mysterious way, to be involved in a process by which a woman's immune defenses, like her hormone levels, actually fluctuate during the menstrual cycle.

The question, of course, is, Why should men be worse off--less well defended--than women? Why should the person standing next to you have a superior immune system, modulated and monitored by her sex hormones? The answer is--and she may not like it--babies. When a woman becomes pregnant, she has to do something truly amazing. For nine months, she has to support inside herself, and not reject, as she would a graft, a bundle of tissue that is antigenically different from hers, because of the father's contribution to its genetic make-up. At the same time, she has to protect herself and this bundle of tissue against any infections. How does she do that amazing thing? No one really knows. But, to do it, she must have inherited something that works for her throughout her life, a much more sophisticated immune system than any man's, one capable of finer tuning. That is likely to be the gift of her two X chromosomes. On them, she has a double set of immune-regulating genes.

End of story? Not quite. Having been evenhanded with men and women throughout this article, we can't quite leave it here. The moral throughout, for men and women, is that for every advantage, there's a disadvantage; for every plus, there's a minus. And the case of the female immune system is no exception. So efficient is it that it sometimes becomes overefficient and attacks the body it's supposed to be protecting. Women suffer much more than men from the so-called autoimmune diseases--from such well-known ones as multiple sclerosis, juvenile-onset diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis to even more mysterious ones, such as Graves' disease, in which the glands, the hormones, the brain and behavior are all affected. The most interesting--and most mysterious--disease in this last category is one called systemic lupus erythematosus (S.L.E.). And it's worth looking at S.L.E. just for a moment, because it suggests how intricately intermeshed the chemistry at the heart of personality is. And it shows, in a sense, how men and women can help each other.

"Systemic lupus affects about 500,000 people in this country, more than 450,000 of them women," says Robert Lahita, a leading S.L.E. researcher and assistant professor of immunology at The Rockefeller University in New York. "It's often extremely hard to diagnose. And it produces in a percentage of people many of the symptoms of depression, obsessional neurosis or schizophrenia. One of the few visible symptoms--and it doesn't always occur--is a rash on the cheeks, which in the 19th Century was thought to make the face look wolflike. That's why it's called lupus--the Latin for wolf. Basically, it's a disease in which the body mounts an attack on the genetic and protein-making machinery inside the cells of its own tissues.

"Now, why is this disease so extraordinarily interesting? Well, first, because it may be brought on by stress, and there's some evidence that it flares up after emotional upsets. So stress and the brain are involved from the beginning. Second, males born with two X chromosomes, as well as their usual Y, can get it more often than normal males. Third, women who have it are made much worse when on the pill; it usually starts at puberty, with few cases after menopause, and its symptoms are often aggravated during menstruation. So the female sex hormones are obviously involved.

"It's the abnormal female-hormone pattern that we've been investigating at Rockefeller. And what we've found out is that two things seem to have gone profoundly wrong in these S.L.E. patients. Their estrogen is being processed in a very odd way: They're making too many by-products that have strong hormonal effects and too few by-products that don't have hormonal effects but do seem to act as chemical messengers in the brain. In a sense, they're making too little brain-active estrogen. At the same time, though, they may have much less active testosterone than they should have. And the approach through testosterone looks like it may be the best treatment we can offer for this mysterious disease. Stress, emotion, sex chromosomes, sex hormones, a deranged immune system and mental disorder--who knows what truths about men and women the study of S.L.E. will help uncover? But, for the moment, the irony is that to treat it in women, doctors will soon be borrowing from men something that lies at the root of their response to stress, their left-brain weakness and their immune inferiority."

Borrowing. It is this, perhaps, that gives the gathering science of men and women its special interest. What is it, for example, that makes women more sensitive to pain than men? What is it that makes their brains more responsive to stimuli than men's? What is it that makes men's--but not women's--blood coagulate when they're given aspirin? Perhaps these principles can be borrowed from one sex and given to the other. Perhaps, above all, whatever mysterious principle allows women to live longer than men can also be borrowed.

Taking it Home

As 20th Century men and women, we're at the beginning of a new age. For the first time, science has tools delicate enough to probe the central mysteries of our behavior and our personality. And, in a sense, all the separate disciplines of science are beginning to come together into one--the science of men and women. Already, that science is burrowing at the roots of madness, stress, mood and lethal physical and mental disorders. And, in the process, it is bringing back from the vast continent of its general ignorance news that all too often we don't want to hear. As is usual with science, that news is both good and bad. Good because it promises new treatments and new cures--and a gradual abandonment of the long-haul tinkering of psychiatry. bad because it will force us to alter radically the way we think about ourselves--about our minds, our personal responsibility, our free will.

It is also bringing back news that we're going to have to face sooner or later about our separate inheritances as men and women. The news is that we're far older than we think we are. And who we are today is simply the current expression of the long history of our coming to this place. We were, and still are, designed by nature for the purposes of that travel, purposes that are still reflected in our strengths and weaknesses alike. Women are still protected for the purpose of motherhood--whether or not, as individuals, they want to have children. Men are still geared to be hunters and sex seekers--whether or not, as individuals, they hunt and seek sex. Men are also less stable and more various than women. "They're the sex through which nature experiments," says Flor-Henry. "In the large scale of things, you see, individual males don't matter very much. They're throwaways. So that has left nature free to experiment with them. That's why there are more sexual deviants among men. That's why there are more mental retardates among men. And that's why there are more geniuses among men."

Pluses and minuses--they belong together at the heart of Freud's special chemism in men and women, making us complementary and necessary to each other. Neither is better, neither is worse. It is not a competition, and we have to learn to understand that. "I think it's rather unfair," says Camilla Benbow, "that when men have a problem, everybody's willing to accept the fact that it's genetic, it's brain damage, it's biological. But when women have a problem, oh, no, it can't be any of those things. It's the environment. I think that's unreasonable."

"'Human males like to manipulate things--from Tinkertoys to the cosmos."'

"Males are born less mature, less sturdy and less ready for the world than girls--in body and in brain."