On Monday the San Francisco Chronicle ran a story about a local neuropsychologist’s new book about what makes female brains intrinsically different from male ones. UC San Francisco researcher Louann Bizendine discovered that you can use neuroscience to prove that women’s brains haven’t changed since the Stone Age, and are still hardwired to make us into hyperemotional creatures who can’t deal with juggling work and child-rearing at the same time.

I haven’t gotten my hands on the book yet, but here are a few choice quotes from Bizendine exerpted in the article:

Women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion, while men have a small country road . . . [Men] have O’Hare Airport as a hub for processing thoughts about sex, where women have the airfield nearby that lands small and private planes.

Connecting through talking activates the pleasure centers in a girl’s brain. We’re not talking about a small amount of pleasure. This is huge. It’s a major dopamine and oxytocin rush, which is the biggest, fattest neurological reward you can get outside of an orgasm.

There is no unisex brain. Girls arrive already wired as girls, and boys arrive already wired as boys. Their brains are different by the time they’re born, and their brains are what drive their impulses, values and their very reality.

I don’t need to point out that this is an example of pseudo-scientific work being used to reinstate cultural stereotypes. I always think it’s funny when people who study gender aren’t surprised when “science” backs up Medieval views of the world, despite the fact that every other Medieval view of the world — think celestial spheres — turned out to be wrong.

I do, however, enjoy the idea that somehow women are getting orgasmic pleasure out of talking to each other. Maybe this book is secretly about lesbianism. Every SMS message you send to your BFF is making . . . you . . . gay!

But seriously, what’s disturbing about the book is that Bizendine seems to think it will be liberatory for women whose child-rearing responsibilities prevent them from achieving success in their careers. She says:

The workplace should realize that women are wired to take care of children, and they want that time and need that time.

The idea, she says, is that workplaces need to be refashioned so that women are allowed to get enough time off and still keep up with their careers. I couldn’t agree more that many workplaces need to be more family-friendly for both men and women. But Bizendine’s argument is the worst imaginable. First of all, it runs the risk of making women appear to be defective or weak during child-rearing years. And secondly, it prevents men from taking equal responsibility for child-rearing.

I am not one of those progressives who believes it’s OK to use whatever bullshit argument you can to help women achieve equality in the workplace. There is nothing magical in my brain that means I should get special treatment. I’d rather see a rational re-invention of the workplace that takes into account the idea that both men and women have an equal responsibility to their young.

Perhaps we could have staggered leave, where the woman gets 8 weeks off, then the man, and so on until the toddler is old enough to deal with daycare. Or maybe all workplaces should be kid-friendly, with on-site childcare professionals to take over when daddy has to go into the lab. Even better, we could arrange for parents to do half their work in the kid-friendly environment of home.

The point is, we will get nowhere with any of these improvements if we argue for them based on the specialness of women’s brains. Give me a break. This is as awful as men arguing that they should get better jobs because their brains make them smarter. Men should be granted the privilege of taking time off to care for their babies, just as women should be granted the privilege of keeping their high-powered jobs after giving birth.

Or, as Linda Hirshman says, get to work!