Susan Pinker
2008
The Sexual Paradox is one of those instantly-polarizing books, but one can only hope that, in the light of another five years of research, it has begun to lose some of the controversial character of its central claim that differences in gender characteristics are largely biological, intensified but not invented by culture.
After all, is there anyone whom we should take seriously who still claims that human nature in general, and gender characteristics in particular, are exclusively cultural? Surely everyone accepts that there is enough evidence of the existence of innate tendencies and trigger systems that the “blank slate” can be safely retired to the archives of once-dominant but now-discredited theories.
