Books like The Well-Dressed Ape: A Natural History of Myself

This woman’s humour is a bit wet – you know, lots of puns and cutesy expressions. Her humour even extends to talking about hunting cookies (I think that is an Americanism for biscuit, if you were wondering). So, lots of this is knee slapping stuff.Look, I could forgive even a crap sense of humour if that was all I had to put up with. I can forgive cute. I can forgive punny. What I struggle to forgive is yet another educated woman telling me about the clear differences between men and women’s brains, another woman making jokes about her inadequacies in being born without a penis. She needs to urgently read Delusions of Gender.Some of the things said here are just silly – women hear differently to men because they have smaller heads and so sound takes less time to … oh wait a second, how fast does sound travel again? And how much bigger are men’s heads to women’s? I guess women see differently too, because light has less distance to travel…And there is lots of bio-bunk and evolutionary just-so stories to explain differences between the sexes that she admits might not even exist. One of my favourites being that men are sexually aroused by the smell of cinnamon, apparently – or rather, they might be, except that the experiment that confirmed this hadn’t really been very well conducted the author informs us – which might beg the question why we are being treated to this crap and nonsense. Actually, that was exactly the question it did beg when I stopped listening to this one about a quarter of the way through. Although, if she had said men become sexually aroused over almond croissant I might have let this one slip.The worst moment was one that reminded me of my undergrad philosophy classes where morons would argue that there is no way to know if the colour I see as red is not the colour you see as blue. She says there is no way to answer this question – and she says this immediately after an extended discussion on the differences in eyesight between dogs and owls and humans – humans having a much better sense of colour, depth of field and eyesight generally than dogs, for example, finding it easier to see a tennis ball in grass. But then, I guess she might explain this apparent contradiction as being her using her more intuitive female brain while I have to make do with my stodgy masculine logical one. Oh well, one must make do with the equipment one has been gifted.This is actually a great idea for a book – perhaps if someone could write it without all of the ‘received wisdom’ about the ‘proven’ differences between the sexes (that are neither proven nor differences) it might even make a book worth reading. Not something I can really say about this one, though.