The Female Brain

In THE FEMALE BRAIN, comedian Whitney Cummings, as star, co-writer, and director, uses the work of neurology professor Louanne Brizendine to create a comedy about the chemical basis for why men and women relate to each other the way they do. Cummings plays Julia, a robotic neurological researcher who has given up on romance, love, and emotional happiness after the breakup of her marriage. She announces that she refuses to be a "victim of my neurochemicals." Constantly citing stereotypical behaviors of men and women and reducing them to the biological chemical components thought to cause such behaviors, she preempts the possibility of any real emotions or attachments she might feel. She often tosses off statistics and facts. Men and women have different sized skulls but the same number of brain cells. Women are seen as worry warts or alarmists, but that's because a part of the female brain, the amygdala, activates earlier to threats than men's do. Couples become less passionate after two years because that's when the brain starts producing less dopamine, the pleasure-related hormone, and more oxytocin, the asexual bonding hormone. Vignettes of struggling couples are shown as they try to spice up their sex lives. One couple (Sofia Vergara and Deon Cole) takes Ecstasy together but forget to have sex. Kevin (Toby Kebbell), a volunteer for Julia's brain scan study, demonstrates no response when shown images of cute kittens. She concludes he has no empathy, unaware that he simply hates cats. When he asks her out, she wants only to have detached first-date sex, which he turns down. Eventually she agrees to date him seriously. Although based on the work of a scientist, the subplot shows a researcher who keeps retesting subjects to get the results she wants, rather than objectively recording and interpreting the results she's actually observing -- depicting her, and the field of research, as sketchy, biased, and less than credible.