Our tricky emotions...

I have so much on my mind tonight that I don't know where to start, so I'll start with 'I miss you Caro' since she is in Davenport tonight, 3 hours away by auto and 1 phone call or email. :)

I have received lots and lots of emails about my blog entries on David and Bathsheba, many divided down religious lines, i.e., bible lovers and not. Some of the more interesting questions have to do with women and their emotions... did Bathsheba hate David or come to love him?, how did the death of her first child with David affect her?, etc. Some women seem to object to thinking that their emotions come into play moreso than men, whereas I see that as one of the sweetest feminine traits.

I had to do a lot of research on the differences in males and females at birth, i.e., genetics, to get my doctorate. One of the more interesting avenues of research centered round the sensitivity of girls vs. boys. Here's an excerpt: At a few hours old girls are more sensitive than boys to touch. Tests between the sexes of tactile sensitivity in the hands and fingers produce differences so striking that sometimes male and female scores do not even overlap, the most sensitive boy feeling less than the least sensitive girl. When it comes to sound, infant females are much less tolerant - one researcher believes that they may "hear" noises as being twice as loud as do males. Baby girls become irritated and anxious about noise, pain or discomfort more readily that baby boys.

Baby girls are more easily comforted by soothing words and singing. Even before they can understand language, girls seem to be better than boys at identifying the emotional content of speech. From the outset of life, girl babies show a greater interest in communicating with other people. One study involves babies of only 2-4 days old. It shows that girls spend almost twice as long maintaining eye contact with a silent adult, and girls also look longer than boys when the adult is talking. The boys' attention span was the same, whether the adult was talking or not - showing a relative bias towards what they could see, rather than what they could hear. From the cradle, baby girls like to gurgle at humans. Most boys are just as talkative, but are equally happy to jabber away at cot toys or looking at abstract geometric designs. Boys are more active and wakeful than girls - the male-wired brain of activity at work.


The female bias towards the personal shows itself in other ways. At four months, most baby girls can distinguish photographs of people they know from photographs of strangers; baby boys cannot."

Do you think women think more with their hearts than their heads? More so or less so than men? Do you deny any gender differences? If you agree there are gender differences, would you prefer their not be any? If you could have been born of the opposite gender, would you have wanted to be?