While others tut-tutted, the photograph on page 1 of The Irish Times on Thursday made me smile. It showed six celebrating Junior Cert girls queuing for a disco, from the waist down. The half-dozen pairs of pins were identical — barely covered in brightly coloured pleated skirts, tanned legs and lurid stilettos. But then children and teenagers make no bones about their desire to be the same as everyone else.

I am often accused of engaging in gross generalisations about the sexes. To men I attribute one set of attitudes and behaviours; to women, another. “We’re all individuals,” they reply, à la Monty Python.

Since I so frequently generalise about human behaviour, I was surprised at being so intensely irritated by The Female Brain, a book by Louann Brizendine, a California-based neuropsychiatrist. Its cover, showing a telephone line squashed into the shape of a brain, promised a frivolous read. By the time I’d read the first page I was already taking umbrage.

Brizendine’s thesis is that the male and female brains are hard-wired differently. In the female brain the area for talking is larger. The male’s area for visual stimulation is bigger. So we like nattering on the phone; they like sexy underwear.

She then examines the stereotypes attributed to men and women and proves, through means scientific and medical, that they’re all true. Men think about sex more often than women (once every 52 seconds for men; once a day, if that, for women). Women read emotions better. The anterior cingulate cortex is larger in the female brain, which means we worry more.

For the independent functioning adult there is nothing more annoying than being told you think a certain way simply because of your gender. We all like to think there is something more profound to our personalities than biology.

But I do believe that since women are the ones who bear and feed children, then it makes sense they should be more suited to staying at home and minding them. Why then did I get so annoyed about this book?

According to Brizendine, it’s all about nature. We are slaves to hormones. Oestrogen, progesterone, oxytocin and, God help us, allopregnenolone: they run riot around our poor little female brains and we are at their mercy until menopause. Every emotion we feel, every decision we take, every lover we choose is influenced by this basic biology.

As she puts it: “Hormones help guide nurturing, social, sexual and aggressive behaviours. They can affect being talkative, being flirtatious, giving or attending parties, writing thank-you notes, planning, cuddling, grooming, worrying about hurting the feelings of others, being competitive, masturbating and initiating sex.”

Even the act of being in love can be deconstructed as a chemical condition that has long been recognised in psychiatry as a state of temporary insanity.

If hormones really guide these activities, it doesn’t look like there is much left for that supposed gift from God — free will — to decide upon.

Knowing that some of us won’t accept being helpless victims in the face of this chemical onslaught, Brizendine says: “If in the name of free will — and political correctness — we try to deny the influence of biology on the brain, we begin fighting our own nature.”

So there you have it: we do have a nature and to fight it is to deny it. Women are more suited to minding babies and men can’t help liking porn.

Before you start listing all the women you know who have no interest in babies, and the men who can’t abide porn, there is an “overlap” rule. She says 10% of men will behave like women and 10% of women will behave like men. The exceptions you can think of are in the 10%. The rest of us are not individuals, we are biological imperatives, according to this theory, which gives little credit to nurturing as a way to overcome our innate tendencies.

But Brizendine is relentless. Due to the fluctuating hormones of the menstrual cycle, she says, women’s moods change like the weather. Men are like mountains, steady and strong, only changing imperceptibly over time.

By blaming mood entirely on hormones, I feel like she’s stealing my emotions. If I cry more easily on day 22 of my cycle than on day 14, that doesn’t mean I’m mad. It just means I’m a woman. Brizendine would like to cure me of my womanhood. She’d put me on the pill so my hormone levels remain stable throughout the month. She would cure me of my feelings.

The most insidious part of her thesis is her attitude to post-menopausal women. After we have coped from puberty through the mommy years and into our fifties, these hormones finally start to decrease. The process by which this happens can be pretty rough: sweats, hot flushes and general misery. Doctors have treated these upsetting symptoms with HRT — hormone replacement therapy. It’s had a bad press, but if I were suffering from such physical miseries I’d take the hormones.

Brizendine doesn’t seem happy to treat menopausal women with HRT for purely physical symptoms. She finds it fascinating that women over 50 are more likely to initiate divorce than a man.

She writes about Sylvia, a “patient”, who found she was no longer interested in making her husband’s dinners, picking up his socks or solving her children’s problems. When the husband objected, she decided she needed a divorce. Brizendine reckoned she needed HRT.

Sylvia’s problem, she diagnosed, was that without oxytocin and oestrogen in her brain to make her a caring mother and wife, she had to take these hormones artificially. Sylvia said no and went for the divorce, but Marcia, another patient, said yes and soon felt like her old self again, “much to her husband’s relief”. He’d been wondering why he’d had to fix his own dinner.

So for most of our lives women are supposedly driven demented by these hormones, and now Brizendine proposes that women who are finally free from their vagaries take more of them. The notion that maybe Sylvia had finally seen sense doesn’t seem to enter Brizendine’s head.

She seems absolutely determined to cure women of being women. Worryingly, she calls herself a feminist.

If a male psychiatrist wrote a book proposing that women’s neurological reality can be cured by a pill, he’d be strung up.