Gil: I disagree with that because it depends on the notion of truth. If you take me, for instance, and say that, because of my natural "manness", I follow or pursue this certain path . . . . now my upbringing suggests already that depending on how I get taught to use my testosterone . . . In other words, in a different culture I might be a different person. If you want to put that aside, there's still the fact that I'm looking for a different thing. It's definitely got something to do with my lived body, my sexual experience, me, who I am, and therefore I might be searching for truth, but Patricia would be searching for a truth as well through her body. But our society has valued my opinion over Pat's.

Kevin: Let's talk about these different truths. Now I know women value their feelings an awful lot. Probably the only thing women value are feelings. In women's sexual fantasies, feelings play a very large role. That's why when women are asked how they would feel having sexual relations with friends, they say they would enjoy it. But if it's with complete strangers, they don't enjoy it, because there's no real feeling there. But with men, it doesn't matter that the woman he's fantasizing about is someone he's never met before, because I would argue that the enjoyment is a more abstract thing. It's not just feeling.

Sue: It's a separate part of his life, isn't it.

Kevin: It's to do with domination, it's to do with control - it's more abstract. So if Truth is closely linked with feelings, well then, yes, women have the Truth. But if Truth is linked with reason and logic, well then, the Truth is in the domain of men.

Gil: Well, it would depend on what truth was. I mean, I would want to reject any absolute notion of truth. I would look more towards the American pragmatist tradition if I was going to look at truth. Truth comes from community. It might be a dynamic thing, and what's true today isn't true tomorrow.

Kevin: Okay, but is this true?

Gil: Well, under that definition it would have to be!

[ General laughter ]

Gil: It depends on how you look at it. Because if you want to look at some kind of correspondence theory of truth - you assume that truth corresponds to some facts - who is going to define these facts? Well, I guess the people in power are going to define these particular facts as true. So we're going to look at a masculine society where truth is valued through rationality, through reason, and it has been for two and a half thousand years. Women can't get an inroad into it because they're constantly having to put up with the way males have defined this truth, and haven't been able to speak from their bodies in order to make it valuable.

Kevin: Well, no, there are absolute truths, and these truths are based on definitions. For example, if we define a certain colour to be black, and another colour to be white, then we can say it's an absolute truth that black and white are different colours.

Gil: Yes, okay.

Kevin: So these truths, based on definitions, are really the only absolute truths there can be, because anything based on perceptions is fallible. So it's only these abstract truths which are absolutely true.

Gil: Alright, yes.

Kevin: So, straight off, it's a fallacy that there are no absolute truths.

Gil: But they're not the truths that would tell me anything useful about the world.

Kevin: They do tell you about Reality - not so much about perceptions, but about Reality. This abstract thinking is very difficult for women, and it's partly because of their brain structure. Now there has been quite a lot of work done on the different brain structures of men and women, and through brain scans and so on they have discovered that men are able to localize thoughts within their minds and are able to focus on particular ideas a lot better than women, whose ideas are a lot more scattered and who are getting information from many sources. So women have a wider spectrum of perceptions, but men are able to focus on things a lot better, and as a result of this men are able to penetrate ideas more successfully, without distractions.

Gil: That's a nice masculine term "penetrating" - but anyway, go on.

Kevin: You thought of it, not me.

Patricia: Are these comparisons done on adult brains?

Kevin: Yes.

Patricia: I'm wondering if there've been studies done on brains of infants? Because one could be a bit skeptical of those studies, for all sorts of reasons.

Sue: I don't think there would be a great deal of difference between the brains of infants. I don't think there's a real change occurring until adolescence. My theory is this: the beginning of puberty is a few years earlier for girls than it is for boys, and it happens at about the same time that kids begin to think better than they ever did before. They're able to reason better; their ideas get sharper; they're better able to concentrate on their ideals. Now, with girls having puberty earlier, the hormones are rushing, their lives get filled with menstruation and beauty and fashion, and everything gets twirled-up into their lives, and they're pushed along immediately into the life of womanhood. They're a woman the moment they start to bleed. But with boys, they don't really go into puberty until a couple of years later, so they've actually had a couple of years to settle-in to thinking about things. So they've got a head start on women already.