RE: During childbirth, women prefer nalbuphine to morphine. Men in pain report the opposite preference. In fact, men often find that drugs like nalbuphine actually make their pain worse.

Did they find some men who could give birth to test this out? OK, I know what you mean, but the conclusion here is still kind of junky. If female soldiers who have had limbs blown off prefer nalbuphine to morphine, then we might be on to something. In fact, this reminds me of the false advertising behind an old Excedrin commercial. The commercial stated that in a “major study of pain other than headache, Excedrin was shown to be significantly better than aspirin.” Yeah, the pain other than headache was post-partum pain, so the study was totally irrelevant to aches and pains which men and women have in common. You also could not even conclude anything useful about the effectiveness of Excedrin for use in headaches by women even though it worked for their post-partum pain.

I don’t disagree with the idea of group differences, but I find it maddening when folks who want to jump on this band wagon don’t think more clearly about the issue. For example, I grew up in Texas, and most of my women relatives despised the kind of teary-eyed BS that some women (and a few men) indulge in. One great-aunt used to deride this as “turning on the waterworks.” But other Southern (non Texan) women were firm believers in the power of tears, especially when it came to handling men. I have also noted that some Latinas, like their menfolk, make a big deal about being able to endure pain and not crying. Still, I think that people who believe that this stuff is only or primarily cultural are smoking something, but those who ignore cultural influences are also confusing the issue.

Also, there is some evidence to suggest that men cry more as they get older, especially after age 40 when testosterone production dips, and that in fact as certain hormone levels in both men and women decline as we age, we become more alike in some ways. This also suggests that old men and young men, and old women and young women, might be seen as different “groups” for some purposes.

Posted by: Alec on December 11, 2005 2:52 AM

Alec -- The Economist's treatment of the question was anything but comprehensive. It left the impression, though, that the studies had been looked at pretty thoroughly from a variety of angles. And they don't minimize the impact of culture. (All those short Peruvian mountain women look about as stoic as a person can be, for instance.) For what that's worth, of course. Like you, I think hormones and age probably play big roles. Guys who have been dosed with lots of female hormones in order to fight prostate cancer, for instance, nearly all find themselves becoming moody and weepy. And women who have been put on lotsa male hormones tend to become much more sexually predatory than usual. I wonder if their experience of pain changes too. So maybe in a few decades there'll be blue and pink pain pills, but maybe also "phase of life" pain pills too. Anything that can be done to deal with pain more successfully is OK with me, that's for sure.

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on December 11, 2005 1:15 PM

Michael – Good points, and I will have to track down that Economist article. People tend to forget that men and women have both “male” and “female” hormones coursing through their bodies and that it’s the proportion that makes life fun. Science writer Natalie Angier made the following points:

-- From age 12 to 50, women have 3 to 10 times more estrogen circulating through the bloodstream than men, but after 50 a man’s gradually rises as a woman’s declines.

-- A number of researchers have suggested that it is testosterone not estrogen that is the true hormone of the libido in men and women alike. But the evidence suggests that for women, testosterone is the “hand- maiden” to estrogen

Hormones, genes, culture, chance all help make us human.

By the way, the current New York Times Magazine, available online as part of nytimes.com, has a fun little “Ideas” piece on research suggesting that the gene that makes redheads may also give them a higher degree of pain tolerance than their blonde or brunette peers (“Stoic Redheads”).

Posted by: Alec on December 11, 2005 2:26 PM

Funnily enough, the Economist piece mentioned that bit about redheads too. There isn't a lot more in the Economist piece than we've touched on here, though. I wonder what the meatier science publications have to say about the topic. Do you like Angier generally? I've always found her very annoying. She's obviously got herself a bagful of interesting facts. But it always seemed to me that her NYT-feminist agenda overrode everything else she might have to pass along. She always seemed to me like "primarily a media feminist who happens to use science to bolster her case" than like "someone who loves to follow, make sense of, and pass along what she finds out about science." Does her work not strike you that way?

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on December 11, 2005 4:24 PM

Michael – Four things redeem Natalie Angier for me. She writes clearly and intelligently; she often picked interesting and provocative topics to write about in her New York Times columns; and she would fairly explicate the scientific issues raised by her columns even if she disagreed with their conclusions. Most importantly, since she often tried to clearly identify scientists and the nature of their research, interested readers could bypass any of Angier’s biases and dig into the information for themselves. By the way, I think that Angier clearly steered clear of any feminist bias in her review of John Colapinto’s “As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl,” a book which clearly demolished the idea that gender is purely a social construction.

On the other hand, I find that many newspaper and magazine science writers don’t understand enough about science to even get the basics right. I can filter out bias, but have no patience for intellectual muddle.

Posted by: Alec on December 11, 2005 6:41 PM






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