Cultural Analysis of "Equal =/= The Same..."

Taco Hoekwater, "The Context Unofficial Logo" 03/09 via Wikipedia Commons, Creative Commons License

For my cultural analysis, I was asked to make a choice between the 3 controversial debates I found. I chose the Equal =/= The Same article because I felt it was more emotionally charged than the others. Especially with the topic of sex differences in the human brain, there is a major cultural background and value to the topic.

1. The three most prevalent and important cultural keywords that I could find in this article were "neurosexists", "equal", and "unisex". Each of these has a societal and cultural implication. The address the question of "does saying men and women are biologically different make you sexist?" This helps to frame Cahill's personal opinion on the topic.

2. The mention of neurosexists is only mentioned by name once, but it is mentioned by its concept throughout the entire article, as it is a main focus of the article. Unisex is mentioned often, because the main opponents to these studies are those who believe human brains are the same, regardless of sex. "Equal" or equality is mentioned both at the beginning and the end of the article, but not so much the middle. This may add to making the thought of equality among sexes in science and society in general stick in the readers mind.

3. The closest thing to a thesis statement that Cahill employs is his sentence "I survived after rejecting my colleagues' advice, and in fact, many neuroscientists have come to realize like me that their deeply ingrained assumption that sex does not matter is just plain wrong." It sums up his main purpose for his article.

4.  Most of the cultural keywords employed are found after Cahill's thesis, scattered throughout the article, with the exception of equality. Equality between sexes is mentioned earlier than the thesis, as early as the first paragraph, which adds emphasis to this key part of cultural context.

5. Overall Cahill clearly uses these keywords to evoke some sort of emotion out of his readers. He is not very shy about his opinions on whether these implications of research done on sex differences are "right" or "wrong", and his thesis reflects this. His thesis, keywords, and article overall reflect a very opinionated and one-sided tone about sex-differences.