THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY OF THE FEMALE MIND., Feminists, Meet Mr. Darwin | |
Quote: THE EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY OF THE FEMALE MIND.
Feminists, Meet Mr. Darwin
by Robert Wright
[Harvard President Lawrence Summers recently drew criticism for suggesting that biology could explain some of the gap between the math and science achievements of men and women. In 1994, then-TNR senior editor Robert Wright took on those who deny innate differences between the sexes, accusing them of holding "patently false beliefs about human nature." At the same time, Wright argued that just because something is natural, it isn't necessarily good or right. Instead, he wrote, our biological discoveries ought "to inform arguments about the social costs and benefits of alternative norms in light of human nature, with heightened awareness of which groups the costs and benefits fall on."]
November 28, 1994
History has not been kind to ideologies that rested on patently false beliefs about human nature. Communism, for example, isn't looking very robust these days. From the beginning communists held that human selfishness, the great crippler of communal utopias, was eradicable. They shaped scientific theory accordingly. Marx insisted that traits acquired through education--a more generous disposition, say--were biologically inherited by offspring. Up until 1964, long after Western geneticists had dismissed this idea, it was still an official doctrine of Soviet biology. Occasionally Soviet geneticists who failed to appreciate the doctrine were sent to prison.
It would be melodramatic to say that today feminism is where communism was at midcentury. Still, it's tempting. Once again an ideology clings to a doctrine that, for better or worse, isn't true--in this case the idea that "gender" is essentially a "construct": that male and female nature are inherently more or less identical. Once again, the falseness of the doctrine is increasingly evident. And, once again, adherents of the ideology can admit this falseness only at some risk--not imprisonment, maybe, but an extremely chilly reception from fellow feminists.
Of course, there are the much-discussed "difference feminists." But even they don't believe--or, at least, don't admit to believing--that men and women are inherently different. They either stay silent on the question of where the differences come from or trace them to early social influences.
There has been much talk about the fragmentation of modern feminism. In addition to the difference feminists (e.g., psychologist Carol Gilligan, linguist Deborah Tannen), there are the "radical feminists" (e.g., Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin), the liberal "equity feminists" (e.g., Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writer Katha Pollitt) and assorted others. But as diverse as these thinkers seem, they are bound by a common thread: none is interested in the well-grounded study of human nature, of the male and female minds.
By "well-grounded study of human nature" I don't just mean, "grounded the way I think the study of human nature should be grounded" (although I do, of course, mean that). I mean grounded in comprehension of the process that designed human beings: natural selection. Specifically, the field of inquiry that I commend to feminists, and that they seem loath to explore, is a science called evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology sees (among other things) some clear differences between the male and female minds. These differences aren't wholly immutable. The difference feminists are right to sense that culture matters; we are a pretty plastic species. Still, many of the differences between men and women are more stubborn than most feminists would like, and complicate the quest for--even the definition of--social equality between the sexes.
The feminist aversion to the Darwinian study of difference has as much to do with Darwinism as with difference. Traditionally, after all, Darwinism has been most potently wielded by the right wing. Feminists fear that it will again be used to justify oppression as "natural," as "in our genes," as beyond our control. That's certainly a danger, but it's not inevitable. And besides, it's not necessarily worse than the alternative danger: that feminism, like communism, will falter under the weight of its doctrinal absurdities; and that the laudable ideals it started with, rather than reaching a gritty compromise with reality, will begin to wither for lack of honest support.
It would be misleading to say that feminists casually disregard Darwinism. A fair amount of effort goes into the disregard. A few feminists have actually studied and then dismissed the Darwinian view of human nature. Unfortunately, they seem to have expended more energy on the dismissal than on the study.
A typical dismissal begins by mocking Darwin's observation that in species after species, "the differences between the sexes follow almost exactly the same rules; the males are almost always the wooers...." The female, "with the rarest exception, is less eager than the male... She is coy.... The exertion of some choice on the part of the female seems almost as general a law as the eagerness of the male." This is a vital observation, for the evolutionary logic behind it (which wasn't grasped until a century after Darwin) underlies many psychological differences between men and women.
Darwin's observation has been ridiculed by Carol Tavris in her much-praised (by feminists) book The Mismeasure of Woman. Tavris calls it the "myth of the coy female." The pattern Darwin thought he saw, she asserts, isn't really there. We can no longer explain sex roles by "appealing to the universality of such behavior in other species" because "other species aren't cooperating."
ctually, they are. To be sure, there are many species whose females are less than devoutly monogamous. There are even species whose females are as sexually assertive as males, or more so. What Tavris doesn't seem to appreciate is how all this variety can specifically reinforce our belief that the general rule of relative female sexual reserve has a genetic basis.
To see this crucial point, you have to first see the modern Darwinian explanation for that reserve. A female can reproduce much less often than a male, because she is stuck with the time-sapping job of birthing and maybe even rearing the young. Thus it makes Darwinian sense for her to appraise carefully the quality of aspiring mates--both their genetic quality and, in species with "high male parental investment," like ours, their ability and willingness to help provide for the young after birth. This quality control helps keep the female from wasting one of her rare and arduous reproductive episodes creating offspring with poor survival prospects. (A woman needn't think about these things; rather, her genetically based impulses of attraction have been shaped by this logic over millions of years; genes encouraging selectivity have flourished, while genes allowing females to squander precious reproductive episodes have not.)
For a male, in contrast, reproduction can be a frequent and low-cost affair; the more sex partners, the more chances to get genes into the next generation. Hence the massively documented fact that males in our species, when sizing up sheerly sexual (not marital) opportunities, are on average less choosy than females. (Among the documentation are male and female tastes in pornography and prostitution, as well as the oft-noted fact that gay males are on average more promiscuous than gay females; both homosexual cultures are a de facto experiment in how one sex behaves when it doesn't have to compromise with the other.)
Now, as it happens, in a few eccentric "sex-reversed" species the males assume much of the burden of giving birth. Male sea horses have an incubation pouch in which the female deposits the eggs. Male phalaropes (sea snipes) sit in the nest and incubate the eggs, taking themselves out of commission and leaving their mates free to embark on another round of reproduction. And these are the species in which stereotypes of courtship behavior most reliably break down; female sea horses and phalaropes are quite sexually assertive. Thus these ostensible "exceptions" to Darwinian logic in fact comply with and bolster it. They are yet more evidence that the sex that can reproduce more often will typically be the randier sex. They are yet more reason to believe that human females, whose reproductive episodes are rare and arduous, are indeed genetically inclined to be more discriminating about sex partners than human males are.
The feminist Anne Fausto-Sterling, author of Myths of Gender, is thus missing the point by 180 degrees when she cites the phalaropes, with their reversed sex roles, and says sarcastically, "You name your animal species and make your political point." You name your animal species and it complies with evolutionary theory. Politics will have to adjust accordingly.
It turns out that females in our species are not, by nature, utterly coy or utterly monogamous. There is physiological evidence that they are "naturally" prone to promiscuity and infidelity under some circumstances. But they are not nearly so prone as males. More to the point: figuring out how naturally adventurous women are, and why, has depended on careful study of various species whose females, for various reasons, don't precisely fit the coy stereotype. (Some of the pioneering work was done by the anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, author of The Woman That Never Evolved.)
So, while Tavris is in one sense right to say the "myth of the coy female" is dead, she is exactly wrong to imply that this means women aren't by nature more sexually reserved than men, or that recent zoology has sapped confidence in the Darwinian comprehension of the human mind. For Tavris and Fausto-Sterling to note that the crudest stereotypes about human sex roles aren't found throughout the animal kingdom, and then end the discussion there, is to get a C- in Evolutionary Biology 101. And these are the two most commonly cited feminist "experts" on Darwinism.
cannot, in the space of this article, try to convince skeptics that men are "naturally" less discriminating about sex partners than women--or that men and women inherently differ in the various other ways I'll discuss. I would direct readers who seek deeper immersion in the arguments for modern Darwinism to various books, including Matt Ridley's The Red Queen, David Buss's The Evolution of Desire and (got a pencil handy?) my own recently published The Moral Animal. (Or, at a more academic level: Donald Symons's The Evolution of Human Sexuality; Martin Daly and Margo Wilson's Sex, Evolution, and Behavior; and The Adapted Mind, edited by Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.)
In lieu of persuasion, I'll mostly confine my assertions about human nature to beliefs that are widely accepted within evolutionary psychology--doctrines subscribed to by, among others, many female (and male) Darwinians who would call themselves feminists. When discussing more speculative theories, I'll so label them. Of course, detached from the larger body of cross-cultural and cross-species evidence in which they're embedded, all these claims will strike any determined skeptic as "just-so stories." But do not excuse yourself from confronting them on grounds that they are just tired Darwinian doctrines, scrutinized by feminists and judiciously rejected. There is not a single well-known feminist who has learned enough about modern Darwinism to pass judgment on it.
Some of them would be well advised to. Though it is simplistic to say that evolutionary psychology vindicates one feminist school or another, some schools could use the field to support at least part of their platform. At the same time, every school can find something in the field that threatens cherished beliefs. Most feminists should have a love-hate relationship with modern Darwinism.
Oddly, given Darwinism's historical (and confused) association with right- wing politics, evolutionary psychology lends a kind of support to some of the most radical feminists, such as MacKinnon and Dworkin. Both have gotten lots of ink for saying genuinely nutty things (such as Dworkin's theatrical suggestion that all heterosexual sex is rape)--pronouncements that defy all attempts at justification. But both have other positions, of more measured extremity, that, if they can be justified at all, are best justified in Darwinian terms.
Consider sexual harassment. MacKinnon helped establish the "hostile environment" test for harassment, and she defines such environments broadly; by her reckoning, two-thirds of working women have been harassed. Whereas some feminists consider the Anita Hill affair a borderline harassment case (if a clear-cut indictment of Clarence Thomas's character), MacKinnon jumped vehemently to Hill's defense.
I can see why: a man who held power over Hill was alleged to have made persistent, if not explicit, sexual overtures. Naturally, Hill would feel great distress. But I can only take this view by thinking of Hill as a woman, with the kind of mind natural selection designed for women. A man might feel uncomfortable with a comparable undercurrent of sexual advance from a female boss, but it would be strange for him to feel deep distress.
Again, the logic goes back to the fact that for women reproductive opportunities are precious. Thus during evolution it was costly (genetically) for a woman to have sex with a man she didn't want to have sex with--often a man who (a) evidently had genes not conducive to viable and fertile offspring or (had no evident inclination to stick around and help provide for the offspring. The abhorrence women feel at the prospect of sex with a man they find unattractive is an expression of this logic.
For men, the logic is different. Being coerced into sex with a woman (a) wasn't an issue during evolution, since men can't have sex unless physiologically aroused; and (would have had no large ill effects; the worst likely outcome for the man (in genetic terms) is that pregnancy would not ensue. And spending fifteen minutes failing to get a woman pregnant is hardly a major Darwinian disaster. There is no reason for evolution to have instilled in the male mind an aversion to coerced sex with women. So, yes, I'd say Anita Hill was sexually harassed. She was under coercive, if subtle, pressure to have sex. But that judgment depends on her mind being a female mind, with female vulnerabilities. Many feminists, even without any help from Darwin, have discerned the tension here: the more protection you want to provide women, the harder it is to argue that they don't by their nature need special protection; the more often you see them victimized, the stronger the implication that they are by nature victims, weaker than men. That is why some feminists resist MacKinnon's broader definitions of sexual harassment and of rape, and her view of pornography as an assault on women. That is why she is called a "victim" feminist--and not just by conservatives such as Christina Hoff Sommers, but by feminists further to the left, such as Naomi Wolf. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who as a liberal equity feminist professes to seek only equal treatment for women, remarked after hearing MacKinnon speak, "That woman has bad karma."
Yet the equity feminists have failed just as surely as MacKinnon to resolve the tension between protecting women and patronizing them. Consider the Supreme Court's unanimous ruling in the latest sexual harassment case. It concerned a woman at a forklift company and her creepy boss. He would joke about large breasts, ask female employees to fish through his pockets for coins and so on. The straw that broke the camel's back was his asking a subordinate if she had landed one of her accounts by meeting with the client at a Holiday Inn.
Ruling in support of the female worker, the Supreme Court tried to sustain a broad definition of "hostile environment." The victim, it said, needn't prove that she had been psychologically damaged--only that she might " reasonably" have found the comments hostile. But, in a bow to Ginsburg and the equity feminists, the Court cast its ruling in terms of a "reasonable person," not a "reasonable woman."
his simply won't wash. How does a "reasonable person" feel about the implication that he or she closed a deal by sleeping with a customer? Well, the average woman feels quite insulted, and the average man feels somewhere between mildly insulted and quite flattered. She is being called a whore. He is being called a stud.
It is tempting to dismiss these value-laden labels as the residue of centuries of patriarchy, or as echoes of the Victorian Madonna-whore dichotomy--ephemeral cultural pathologies that the Court needn't stoop to accommodate. But there is another explanation: these moral judgments may have a genetic basis.
To begin with, men tend to find a history of extreme promiscuity an exceedingly undesirable feature in a wife, and this makes perfect Darwinian sense. The more promiscuous the wife, the less likely that the children in which the man invests his time and energy are in fact carrying his genes. In other words, genes inclining men to abhor promiscuous long-term mates would do better at getting into ensuing generations than less discriminating genes. The logic isn't the same for women, since the children they give birth to always carry their genes (or, at least, did during evolution, before high technology--and that's what counts).
This isn't to say men don't find loose women sexy. From a Darwinian standpoint, loose women are in some ways great sex partners, because they're so easy to get--and for purposes of a man's genetic proliferation, remember, the more gettable women there are the better. (Contraception has now short-circuited this logic, too, but again: we're stuck with the minds the logic shaped.) A loose woman just isn't the genetically optimal woman to fall in love with; investing in her children is ill-advised.
Hence, it seems, the Madonna-whore distinction. Men appear to be designed by natural selection to feel merely lust for fast women but to feel love as well for (some) slower ones. They won't always insist on marrying a Madonna, of course, virgins being scarce, and, besides, the choice of a mate being a complex unconscious calculus full of tradeoffs. Still, men do often draw a morally colored distinction among their romantic prospects, viewing some kinds of women as full-fledged human beings, warranting extensive psychological exploration, and other kinds as something more like pieces of meat. And one of various features that can put a woman in the latter camp is a reputation for extreme promiscuity. Men seldom admit this to either kind of woman, and some men don't admit it to themselves. But if you listen carefully to men talking to one another, the attitude is there.
It is not surprising, then, that the average woman resists being publicly labeled "easy," regardless of her actual degree of promiscuity. During evolution, that label would have cut the chances of a man's investing in her offspring. (A general theme of evolutionary psychology is that we all naturally burnish our reputations in all kinds of ways, regardless of whether the gloss reflects our actual behavior.)
his idea of an inherent and morally charged male mental distinction between fast and slow women is just a theory. And, while it probably commands majority allegiance within evolutionary psychology (though only when given more nuance than space here permits), it is not as solidly established as, say, the idea of sex differences in promiscuity. Even more tentative is the idea that women have some natural aversion to accusations of extreme sexual looseness (though certainly women do, in general, resist them more than men). Still, the closer we look at the evidence, the better things look for the theory. Various culturally deterministic anthropologists, notably Margaret Mead, claimed to have found exotic cultures in which women were as prone to promiscuity as men and no one cared. These claims have collapsed upon re-examination. Mead's favorite example, Samoa, turns out to have featured a virtual male obsession with the virginity of mates. (In Samoan lore, as Derek Freeman noted in Margaret Mead and Samoa, a deflowered woman is called a " wanton woman, like an empty shell exposed by the ebbing tide." A song performed at defloration ceremonies went like this: "All others have failed to achieve entry... Being first, he is foremost. O to be foremost.")
All of this explains what for almost everyone is the commonsense reaction to the forklift case, yet what few feminists will admit: the reason the remark about the Holiday Inn was offensive was because it was made to a woman. What evolutionary psychology suggests is that this relevance of gender to law is no fleeting creation of culture; jurists might as well reckon with it.
In the end, the problem with the Ginsburgian "reasonable person" formulation is not that it leads to a narrow definition of harassment, but that it leads to no definition at all. Asking what a "reasonable person" finds offensive is like asking what color a typical fruit is. The answer depends on whether you're talking apples or oranges.
The general truth suggested here is that we can either give women broad protection against sexual harassment that is grounded specifically in an understanding of the female mind, or we can ignore sex differences and give women much less protection. Or we can do what the Supreme Court did: carefully craft tortured legal doctrines that defy both common sense and our emerging comprehension of human nature--doctrines that are unlikely to withstand the test of time.
Evolutionary psychology's tendency to provide at least some support for radical feminism goes beyond sexual harassment. Dworkin's contention that "dehumanization is a basic part of the content of all pornography" is characteristically overstated, but in Darwinian light it looks far from crazy. Certainly most pornography rivets the "whore," not the "Madonna," part of the male mind. The women in Hustler aren't women a man would want to marry. They're women whose appeal has nothing to do with getting to know them. Indeed, they're women who are exciting partly because they're portrayed as not demanding that he get to know them; they seem willing to be treated as meat, as optimally efficient sex objects.
o say that men objectify loose women isn't to say, alas, that men never see the lucky recipients of their lasting affection as objects. The male tendency to "possessively" guard mates against the advances of rivals may be more than mere metaphor. For men, "the same mental algorithms are apparently activated in the marital and mercantile spheres," write the evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson. Again, the reason seems to be the high genetic costs cuckoldry brings the male victim. As evolutionary psychologists have shown, the average woman isn't as threatened as the average man by the purely sexual infidelity of a mate, apparently because it doesn't so immediately threaten her genes.
Even the radical feminists' famously expansive definitions of rape have some Darwinian merit. One of MacKinnon's more moderate utterances on the subject is this: "Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated." Psychologically, too, you might call it that. When a woman has sex under a man's pretenses of enduring affection (Darwinian translation: pretenses of commitment to ensuing offspring) and then he never calls again, the evolutionary source of her anguish is the same as for the anguish following rape: she has had sex with a man she (unconsciously) deemed unworthy of her eggs, even though in this case the deeming was done after the fact, once evidence of his unworthiness surfaced.
Again, though, if you really want to claim such a broad realm of moral protection for women, you have to admit they're different from men and in some ways uniquely vulnerable. Men, after all, virtually never feel "violated" by sex with a woman. A man may feel crushed if a woman he loves leaves him, but it is an odd man indeed who regrets the sex.
Dworkin has distinguished between rape and seduction as follows: "In seduction, the rapist bothers to buy a bottle of wine." Another feminist has opined that rape is "on a continuum" with normal male sexual behavior. Some Darwinians would agree. They'd say rape is something men do when other forms of manipulation fail. It may be "natural" when men with a manifest inability to legitimately obtain a mate resort to sex with aggression. Hence the profile of the typical rapist: lacking the material and personal resources to attract women.
Dworkin has written, "A man wants what a woman has--sex. He can steal it (rape), persuade her to give it away (seduction), rent it (prostitution), lease it over the long term (marriage in the United States) or own it outright (marriage in most societies)." However depressing, this would strike some Darwinians as a fair thumbnail sketch of the situation. This doesn't mean men think of their pursuits this way (in general the radical feminists attribute too much conscious calculation to men); but it is a fairly apt functional analysis of the emotions men feel--from lust to love to the selective evaporation of affection upon conquest.
Plainly, the resonance between radical feminism and Darwinism isn't just that the former's implicit depiction of female vulnerabilities is explicit in the latter. Darwinism also depicts men as something like the animals that MacKinnon and Dworkin say they are. Human males are by nature oppressive, possessive, flesh-obsessed pigs. They're not beyond cultural improvement, thanks to the fact that love, compassion, guilt, remorse and the conscience are evolved parts of the mind, just like lust and jealous rage. Still, MacKinnon and Dworkin are probably right to suggest that the current cultural climate does a lackluster job of improving men.
I won't spend the next few weeks waiting for MacKinnon and Dworkin to call and thank me for empowering their worldview. For they don't want its power to run quite so deep. Dworkin denounces "female supremacists"--some of the difference feminists--as being "biological determinists." (Remarkably, she does this one paragraph after asserting that "men as a class are moral cretins.") MacKinnon, hit by less radical feminists with the entirely apt label "victim feminist," tries to fob it off on the difference feminists. Her reaction to Gilligan's book In a Different Voice, which depicted women as more empathetic and less abstractly logical than men in their moral thinking, was to call this "different" voice "the voice of a victim."
This aversion to "biological determinism" (a misnomer) is one thing all major brands of feminism have in common. Even the difference feminists don't want to talk about deep differences. Tannen, in her bestseller You Just Don't Understand and her recent Talking From 9 to 5, says men are on average more concerned than women with status and hierarchy. This undeniable fact begs to be placed on its proper Darwinian foundation. During evolution, high male status seems to have expanded sexual access to females (as it does in many species, including our nearest relatives, chimpanzees). This Darwinian perk has been documented in "hunter-gatherer" societies, the closest living model of the social context of human evolution. Given this distinctively male link between social achievement and genetic proliferation, it is plausible, to say the least, that millions of years of evolution would endow males with a distinctive thirst for power.
Yet Tannen couches her explanation for this thirst in cultural terms. The tendency of boys to "jockey for center stage, challenge those who get it and deflect challenges" is "learned" by boys and not girls because boys' groups "tend to be more obviously hierarchical." Well, yes, lots of learning goes on, and every child has a range of flexibility whose bounds still aren't precisely known. Culture matters. But does that explain why the boys' groups are always more hierarchical in the first place? Tannen's overriding emphasis on culture would make more sense if she could point to a single one of the 1,200 societies on the anthropological record and show women, on average, pursuing social status and political power as fiercely and opportunistically as the average man. She can't.
Poor Tannen. Her evasion of Darwinism fails to keep her safe from the wrath of even the mild-mannered equity feminists. Katha Pollitt says Tannen and Gilligan "massage their findings to fit their theories," and that their prominence just proves that social science is "one part science and nine parts social. They say what people want to hear: women really are different, just the ways we always thought." Maybe so. But did you ever wonder why it is that we've always thought that?
It's logical that liberal feminists would fear the idea of innate sex differences in ambition. For it imperils two liberal feminist legal principles. One is sex discrimination--in particular, the claim that a gross underrepresentation of women in high-paying jobs is by itself evidence of discrimination. This logic assumes not just that men and women are equally qualified, but that they pursue a given job or promotion with equal intensity. If men are on average more ambitious than women, this assumption falters.
The second legal doctrine imperiled by evolutionary psychology is affirmative action for women. It is sometimes (not always) justified on similar grounds: that, in the absence of discrimination, men and women would be equally represented at the higher levels of corporate and government life. But if men on average work harder at self-advancement, this rationale won't work.
As Ridley notes in The Red Queen, there are other possible rationales for affirmative action. Our emerging knowledge of male-female differences might lead us to favor quotas for women on grounds that they are less inclined than men to sacrifice the organization's welfare to personal advancement. In other words: if a meritocracy is a place where people are promoted according to their actual value to the employer, then affirmative action may be needed to make the workplace a meritocracy. (The business pages are full of tales of male primates who follow their impulses to no good corporate end. How much money did Barry Diller waste trying vainly to outbid his old rival, Sumner Redstone, in the battle over--as it were--Paramount? A lot, but maybe not as much as Redstone wasted by "winning.")
Evolutionary psychology suggests that if affirmative action for women is to rest on coherent logic, the subject of sex differences will have to come into play. Once again: if women want broad protection, they can most cogently seek it as women, not as persons.
The deepest source of the feminist aversion to Darwinism is larger and vaguer than specific policy issues. Evolutionary psychology seems to paint a generally grim view of the "natural" order. Some of the ugliest things about the world--the very things that stirred modern feminist indignation to begin with--have biological roots. These include the male "patriarchy" that the radicals see everywhere they look, and men's attempts to control the sexuality of women. Even the classically reviled male hypocrisy over promiscuity--the "double standard"--appears to be a legacy of natural selection. Men not only are naturally inclined to cheat on their mates; men are also inclined to abhor, and thus fiercely condemn, the philandering of a mate. Women share both of these inclinations, but they aren't as strong as the male versions. Indeed, a woman may actually reinforce the double standard when she finds herself able to forgive a husband's sexual infidelity in order to head off what for her female ancestors was a much bigger threat--a mate's desertion, his withdrawal of resources.
None of this is great news for feminism (or, really, for humankind). But it isn't quite as bad as it seems. By getting clear on what the word "natural" does and doesn't mean, we can isolate the parts of evolutionary psychology that should most worry feminists.
o infer that what's "natural" is morally "good" is an elementary logical error, famously labeled the "naturalistic fallacy" by the turn-of-the-century British ethicist G.E. Moore. Indeed, I would go further. Darwinism not only doesn't tell us that the double standard is morally right; it tells us that any intuitive sense men have of its rightness is untrustworthy. This sense is a mere vestige of natural selection, morally arbitrary so far as we know. A central lesson of evolutionary psychology by my lights is that we should cast a wary eye on our moral intuitions generally (including, for example, the sense that retribution is just); they are a voice not from God but from our genes, echoes of our amoral creator, natural selection. What's natural may or may not be good, but it's certainly not good by virtue of the fact that it's natural.
Another thing "natural" doesn't mean is unchangeable. There are cultures in which the "natural" male impulse to control female sexuality is expressed as ritual genital mutilation. There are cultures in which a man may punish the infidelity of a wife by, say, cutting off her ears. But there are also cultures, like ours, in which men don't do such things. And there is no reason to think we've reached the biological limit of male malleability. Evolutionary psychologists aren't genetic determinists, and they aren't "biological determinists" except in a sense so broad as to encompass both genes and culture.
So much for the good news. The bad news is: (a) The average beer-drinking, two-timing, wife-beating lout isn't going to change his moral views after being handed a copy of G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica. He is more likely to conveniently see modern Darwinism as a divine embrace of his loutishness. And: (People, though malleable, aren't simply and infinitely malleable. They aren't malleable enough to make communism a productive economic system, and they aren't malleable enough to create a society of perfect behavioral symmetry between men and women. Some changes simply can't be made, and others will come only at some cost.
Here is where the word "natural" assumes a second import that is not so easily dismissed as the first, and that feminists may find uncomfortable. Here we can expect men to turn the tables and use evolutionary psychology to talk about their vulnerabilities, to make their appeals for special treatment on grounds of peculiar biological predicament. Thus, for example, a man could argue for the double standard by saying (a) that his own philandering is hard to control, and (that he is more "vulnerable" than his wife to the pain of a mate's sexual infidelity.
Obviously, this is a self-serving argument. And it can be combated in two ways: by pointing to the social costs of male infidelity (which, I would argue, are extremely high in the current social environment); and by noting that "hard to control" doesn't mean "impossible to control." Still, this argument, though combatable, isn't laughable in the way the naturalistic fallacy is. It uses our understanding of "natural" impulses not to justify them as being right, strictly speaking, but to excuse them by stressing the psychic costs of defying them. Feminists are right to dread some of the rhetorical resistance Darwinism will abet.
Men seeking to stress their victim status can also lay claim to being "objectified" much as women are. Feminists complain about women's beauty and youth counting for so much in the eyes of men. (And this male obsession, according to evolutionary psychologists, isn't merely a product of Madison Avenue.) But men could just as easily complain about being viewed as walking wallets--about the fact that women place so much value on the social status and/or wealth of a mate. (This emphasis, too, appears to be a legacy of evolution, a deep aesthetic impulse that lives on after its evolutionary logic has been broken by a modern world in which women can earn their own wealth and status.) One reason you don't hear more about this male grievance is that low-status men have trouble getting their grievances heard. They aren't a very prominent group.
In the end, Darwinism's proper place in moral discourse is not to aid simplistic assertions about some natural order that is supposedly good or supposedly inevitable; but, rather, to inform arguments about the social costs and benefits of alternative norms in light of human nature, with heightened awareness of which groups the costs and benefits fall on. The issue of what's "natural" will enter the debate, but by itself should confer no justification for anything.
eminists' fear of the word "natural," and their attendant reluctance to confront sex differences, has left open a gaping intellectual niche. Perhaps it is poetic justice that the void is being semi-occupied by the scourge of name-brand feminism, the dreaded Camille Paglia. At least, Paglia professes to be a Darwinian; she talks about "instinctual drives" and says primal things like "sex crime means back to nature." Still, she has no evident grasp of evolutionary theory and prefers free-form literary explanation. For example, when men kill mates or ex-mates, it is usually out of jealousy, and many evolutionary psychologists would call this an extreme, pathological expression of a "natural" impulse to punish a woman for real or suspected infidelity. But Paglia has a different explanation: "Men who kill the women they love have reverted to pagan cult. She whom a man cannot live without has become a goddess, an avatar of his half-divinized, half-demonized mother, a magic fountain of cosmic creativity." Thanks for clearing that up.
For all her impressionistic excess, Paglia does tell a few simple, crude truths about sex differences, and this is one reason she's gotten where she is today (the other being the impressionistic excess). If name-brand feminists don't like the moral spin she puts on her comic-book Darwinism, there's one solution: to learn real Darwinism and put their own moral spin on it. It is certainly spinnable; like all theories of human behavior, evolutionary psychology has no inherent moral upshot. It merely limits the range of realistic moral and political discourse. Within the arena thus defined, interest groups will contest, each trying to shape the moral and legal codes to its ends. And the groups that aren't in the arena will lose.
n retrospect, much of the recent history of feminism might have been predicted with the help of evolutionary psychology. To begin with, the prime mover of modern feminism, the discontent of the 1950s suburban housewife, was entirely natural. To see this, you need only look at a hunter-gatherer society, which, being a rough approximation of the social context of human evolution, is a rough guide to the patterns of behavior "natural" to us, absent the influence of modern technological society. In hunter-gatherer societies, women have a career: gathering. This may sound to an upper-middle-class feminist like menial labor, but it gets them out of the house. (And besides, menial compared to what--hunting?)
But women in such societies are also mothers, the primary caregivers. And reconciling their home and work lives is surprisingly practical. When they go out to gather food, child care is barely an issue; their children may go with them or, instead, stay with relatives. And when mothers, back from work, do care for children, the context is social, even communal. As the anthropologist Marjorie Shostak wrote after observing the !Kung San hunter-gatherers, "The isolated mother burdened with bored small children is not a scene that has parallels in !Kung daily life." Women weren't designed to be suburban housewives.
The generic suburban habitat of the '50s was more "natural," more congenial, for men. Like many hunter-gatherer fathers, vintage suburban husbands spent a little time with children and a lot of time out bonding with males, in work, play or ritual. Thus the grievance that drove 1950s housewives toward feminism was solidly grounded: suburbia let men behave naturally while forcing mothers into artificial isolation--removed from their kin, often lacking close friends and devoid of purpose beyond child-rearing.
If this inequity is clear from a Darwinian vantage point, so is the reason that redressing it has been hard. It is no surprise that many working mothers feel not just harried by their dual identity but guilty about it--guilty about, say, spending forty hours a week away from a 1- or 2-year-old child while the child is in the hands of someone who is neither kin nor close friend. To judge by hunter-gatherer societies, this is quite an unnatural predicament. That doesn't mean women can't adapt to it. But anecdotal evidence suggests that they don't easily do so, and that some working mothers today aren't dramatically happier than the lonely suburban mothers of the 1950s.
This is one of the most pressing issues now facing women. Various partial solutions are possible, such as job-sharing and workplace-based child care. But if these are to be pursued vigorously as feminist issues, it would help to acknowledge that they are fundamentally the concerns of women; that, although men can certainly play a large role in child-rearing, it's much easier for the average man than for the average woman to be away from young offspring--and that it always will be.
Many feminists will admit no such thing. The reason women have always been primary caregivers, Pollitt writes, has nothing in particular to do with their psychology. "Historically, women have taken care of children because high fertility and lack of other options left most of them no choice." Well, yes, that's been going on for a while--throughout human evolution, in fact. That's why any evolutionary psychologist finds it hard to believe that natural selection wouldn't have molded the female mind to this task. The task, after all, is pretty vital: protecting the vessel that carries the genes into the next generation.
Some consider the liberal equity feminists the most sober of the major schools of feminism, and Pollitt in particular has become known as the voice of calm reason. Yet she and the other mainstream liberals may have the most warped vision in all of feminism. Quite unlike the difference feminists, and more than the radical feminists, they are committed to ignoring basic features of reality. Imagine a social observer as acute as Pollitt not sensing how deeply--well, for lack of a better term--maternal women are compared with men. That must take a lot of perceptual restraint.
hen Pollitt, under the pressure of overwhelming evidence, does concede some distinctive female feature, she seems disappointed, no matter how ostensibly laudable it is, and hastens to predict its demise. Thus she grants that "social scientists who look for it can find traces of empathy, caring and so on in some women who have risen in the world of work and power." But that's just because "we are in a transition period" and working women haven't yet learned the ropes. Thus, it seems, we can look forward to a day when working women will have been stripped of the last trace of empathy and caring. Then they'll be just like men. Congratulations.
The reductio ad absurdum of Pollitt's attitude has been performed by the feminist novelist Katherine Dunn. When she isn't celebrating the several women who have taken up boxing (equal opportunity brain damage!), Dunn spends her time trying to dispel some of the fuss about wife-beating. In both this magazine and Mother Jones, she has touted some study that found that women strike their husbands about as often as men strike their wives. Well, maybe so (though probably not). But getting hit is not the essence of being an abused spouse. Chronic intimidation is. How many husbands live in fear of assault by their wives? How many husbands, while out with their wives, desperately avoid eye contact with the opposite sex lest they be beaten upon returning to their cage? That major liberal magazines are publishing articles whose predictable effect is to downplay the plight of battered wives is a sure sign that equity feminism's denial of harsh Darwinian truths is reaching pathological extremes.
o be sure, neither the difference feminists nor the radical feminists come close to getting the whole picture. The difference feminists often stress ways women are good, and the radical feminists always stress ways men are bad; both tend to ignore female badness and male goodness. Also, of course, both schools deny any important role for biology. Still, at least the larger project of the radical feminists and, especially, of the difference feminists, is quietly eroding that denial; the fit between Darwinian theory and the social reality they're documenting is too neat to go unnoticed. That these feminists are emphatically not Darwinians makes their database even more valuable as objective corroboration.
The radical feminists' penetrating perception of social reality, paired with delusion about its deepest roots, is reminiscent of Marxism. Though Marx fooled himself about human nature, his view of the way the upper classes exploit their power, manipulating ideology to the detriment of the less fortunate, is acute (and, actually, quite Darwinian), much like the radical feminists' keen attention to the levers of male sexual power. (Though the radical feminists tend to ignore the often subtler means by which women use their sexuality to control men.) And the parallels don't end there. Like the Marxists, the radical feminists are marginalizing themselves by the hyperbole of their indictment and by their dreams of a perfect post-revolution world. They depict an enemy of overwhelming force and envision its unconditional surrender.
With both Marxism and feminism, the struggle against the forces of oppression is worthy and, up to a point, practical. But in both cases, the struggle is best conducted with thorough comprehension of those forces and of their bases in human nature. If feminists--of all stripes--want to know their enemy, it is now available for inspection.
| Link to the article.
~ A man needs a woman like a lion needs a stove. ~
~ Women deserve only equal opportunity, not equal outcomes. ~
~ Men are not collectively "guilty" of anything. ~
~ Never needing to be pregnant is a blessing. ~
~ Feminist ideology “men have to respect women, but women have no reason to respect men” ~
~ Everybody makes choices, and nobody should be entitled to special treatment because of those choices.
Equal results based on unequal treatment amounts to no kind of equality at all. ~
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17th-March-2007
