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"Feminist" was always a little too dainty sounding, so call the new consciousness "femaleist." The femaleist premise could be summarized as: Yes, we are different--wanna make something of it? Up till now, feminists have usually been leery of acknowledging gender differences, arguing that all but the most visibly obvious of them are the products of culture, not genes, and could be erased by the appropriate legislation and child-rearing practices. But the differences are real, various and not easy to parse in terms of the Framer's intentions, if any. Women are more likely to be righthanded and less likely to be color-blind than men. Their brains are smaller, as befits their smaller body size, but more densely packed with neurons. Women have more immunoglobulins in their blood; men have more hemoglobin. Men are more tuned in to their internal aches and pains; women devote more regions of their brain to sadness. You do the scoring.
Yes, men are the physically more imposing sex. On average, they are 10% taller, 20% heavier and 30% stronger, especially in their upper bodies. But women are more resistant to fatigue; the longer the race, the more likely they are to win it. Furthermore, as millions of women prove daily by the sweat of their brow, the muscle gap is not carved in stone. Hales reports on a 1995 U.S. Army test of female physical potential, in which 41 out-of-shape women--students, lawyers, bartenders and new mothers--achieved the fitness level of male Army recruits in just six months of working out, getting to where they could jog two miles with a 75-lb. backpack and do dozens of squats with a 100-lb. weight on their shoulders. In competitive sports too, women have been playing a stunning game of catch-up. Today's women stars can run, swim and skate faster than any man of a few decades ago, and the gap may eventually close. Since 1964, women's marathon running times have dropped 32%, compared with only 4.2% for men. If the trend continues, female marathoners could be leaving men in the dust sometime in the next century.
As biology advances, some of the differences between the sexes are turning out to be a little more complicated than we learned in 10th-grade biology, when testosterone was clearly the boy hormone and estrogen the girl hormone. Not only are both hormones present in both sexes, but estrogen is a real busybody, acting on just about every kind of tissue there is. Angier likens it to chocolate, "since almost every two-bit organ or tissue wants a bite out of it." Men deficient in estrogen aren't more manly; they're more prone to such diseases as osteoporosis. Women produce testosterone, and may even need it for sexual arousal. But despite its reputation as the roughneck's Power Bar, scientists can find no clear-cut relationship between testosterone levels and aggressiveness. Angier reports that men's testosterone levels actually drop before certain challenges like parachuting or, to judge from Saving Private Ryan, landing at Normandy. So whatever the molecular motives of estrogen and testosterone, sorting hospital nurseries into pink and blue sections may not be foremost among them.