Evolutionary psychologists specialize in coming up with primal, survival-related explanations for The Way Men and Women Are, carelessly tossing around – not to mention way overusing – words like “hardwired.” (Translation: “That’s just the way it is – don’t dare dream of this changing any time soon! Abandon hope!”) Take this recent gem from psychologytoday.com: “Apparently, men’s bodies are hard-wired to compete with rival semen.” Alrighty, then. While some of their scenarios are thought-provoking, upon a closer peek, some of their interpretations make them little more than Professional Guessers. And most of them saddle men with the majority of the blame along with the glory (no fair for anyone) for most of humanity’s traits around mating and reproduction, and just about everything else besides “nurturing,” “empathy,” and “relationship-building.”
So it’s time we flip the speculation on its head and ask why other explanations couldn’t be at least as plausible as their male-centric ones, or even just considered as other possible explanations. I don’t claim to know either way; I personally prefer to evaluate each individual I meet based on their unique personhood and not through a pair of gender-filter glasses. My Female Intuition (couldn’t resist) tells me that men and women share both the blame and the glory, so as long as we’re offering guesses a la pop evo psych, here are some alternatives to chew on:
The topic of procreation itself is rife with maybe/maybe-nots in the world of evo psych. Naturally, women’s reproductive capacity is more limited than men’s, both by length of pregnancy and lifetime fertility – no argument there. But evo psych experts tend to parlay these differences into advantages for men, while women’s sexuality is treated as secondary or non-existent, but of course always passive. But who’s to say fertility differences weren’t intended to favor both men and women – at least back in cavewoman days, before STDs? Let me count the ways:
1. Last time I checked, you can’t get pregnant while you’re pregnant, so… free bird! I know, I know – it may sound scandalous, but that doesn’t make it unlikely. As for that prized paternity certainty, it’s certainly not at risk in this scenario, making this an evo-psych win-win!
2. After menopause, you can’t get pregnant, so… freer bird!
3. It’s said that women’s desire for, competence in, and enjoyment of sex increases as they age, so essentially, as their fertility declines, they get hornier and better in the sack. Yet another win-win, I’d say.
4. Evo psych says men like to spread their seed (gag) while women hang back at home, being nurturing and empathetic. But if men were out doing all that hunting and gathering, without permanent residence, while the women maintained the hearth, who had sure access to a place to cozy up with a lover? Just saying.
5. Research has shown that our brains produce Phenylethylamine (PEA) in the beginning of a relationship, the phase which is said to be a “state of limerence,” giving us that intensely-in-love feeling (though I sometimes wonder if it isn’t more fear than exhilaration). Either way, the concentration of PEA apparently starts declining after nine months, which I heard one psychologist explain was just enough time for the evolving male to stick around until his baby was born before he felt that old familiar longing in his loins and had to answer the call of duty, bless his heart.
This plays very nicely into some theorists’ – and their believers’ – fantasy of jaunting from woman to woman every nine months or so, valiantly sharing prized sperm and kindly enduring the pregnancy before dashing off to fulfill his destiny by bestowing his badness upon the next waiting lass. But wait – wouldn’t that also mean that a woman having children with multiple partners would also be the norm rather than the exception? I don’t see why not. And, who’s to say the reason PEA lasts nine months isn’t so the woman will stay for the duration of the pregnancy, ensuring the baby’s chances of survival, before moving on to find another partner? Or, how about the same explanation for both men and women?
The point is, as long as we’re arbitrarily assigning gender-based explanations for human behavior and mating patterns and personalities and biology, let’s consider the other vantage point, too, and all possibilities in between. As illustrated above, we could paint a different scenario, but why paint one at all if we’re not sure? All that does is deepen the gender divide, which could stand to use some bridging.
(This was a post on my blog, http://torirodriguez.typepad.com)
Suggested reading: Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences, by Cordelia Fine, PhD; and Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences, by Rebecca M. Jordan-Young, PhD
4 Comments
This was a really good post. I am someone who is very interested in what science has to say about the world, but the evo-pysch explanations of things can be a real bug up my arse sometimes.
It seems like “Science says” is the new ‘The Bible says”. People forget that the purpose of science is to explain how things work, not to provide any kind of moral reason for anything. So I tend to snort in derision when I read crap about “Men and Women do XYZ because of cavemen! Cavemen! Therefore this is the way it should be. Stop going against your hardwired NATURAL INSTINCTS. You’re messing up the scientific order of things.”
At best, it can be theorised why something might have been an advantage to surviving but it doesn’t take people (usually journalists deciding they are qualified to analyse a scientific study) long to jump to X did Y so X is FOR Y purpose and thats all and thats how its SUPPOSED to be. Its NATURAL.
What is this nonsense? I hardly recognize the dear old evolutionary theory under that pile of straw-men and bullshit. It’s not the theory’s fault if some people are misusing or misunderstanding it. In pure scientific evolutionary psychology there is no political agenda or gender bias. There are just empirical observations and logical models for explaining them. If somebody doesn’t like it, too bad. It’s still a valid theory, if user properly.
Evolution doesn’t produce perfection. From the evolutionary point of view the individuals can go to hell in a hand basket as long as the whole population survives. Nature doesn’t understand words like “scandalous”, “immoral”, or “indecent”.
In nature, if an individual female wants to maximize the survivability of her offspring, she makes sure to have children with as many male as possible. Even better if some of the guys happen to be exotic foreigners. That way the children have a greater variety in immune response and there is a chance at least some of them survive random pandemias. At the same time it would be nice to have a supporting family helping to raise the children. So Hell Yeah there is a biological benefit for women to “hang back at home, being nurturing and empathetic” while banging good-looking travelers. Just like for men there is a similar incentive for having sex while abroad. So what? There’s no news in that. That’s what we have been doing for the past three billion years. And it sure as hell doesn’t mean women can’t travel.
We really shouldn’t restrict scientific research just because the results might deepen the gender divide, offend the minorities, or make baby Jesus cry. As long as there are no clear ethical barriers for research, just Science Away! Just because we find some new statistical correlations or manage to explain why it is evolutionary preferable to have sex with our own species doesn’t automatically turn us to biological automatons or lead to Sharia law. Thankfully we are not prisoners of out genes.
I strongly agree.
I’m quite taken aback by how far some feminists will go to totally debunk evo-psychology. It doesn’t make sense to me. Just because you fear the connotations of something has no bearing on whether it’s true or not. Not to mention alot of findings are quite frankly really obvious.
What I also hate is when people say things like, “it doesn’t matter if we are hardwired to do X, people still have free-will”. That misses the point on so many levels.
First of all, our current “enlightened” existence is but a spec a sand in the beach of existence . Humans have been evolving for millions of years so to think that 50 or 100 odd years of enlightenment is going to allow us to break free is insane. It’s not even close to enough time for us to weed out or overcome biological instincts that go back millions of years.
Second of all, it DOES matter if people’s actions are based on biology. And I mean, would you rather think people are doing these things b/c they are jerks or because they have a deep seeded instinct to? I’d rather believe it’s instinct/innate.
And finally, none of this is based on individuals. Obviously an individual human can defy stereotypes/instincts/etc. In fact evolution DEMANDS that some of us do this. But thinking like this is thinking too small. You have to think on a macro-level. Individual humans may be able to overcome biological drivers but HUMANITY as a whole, on a macro-level, cannot. Thus it’s always critical to look not at the outliers who defy biological but at the most common / most observed behaviours across the species as a whole.
Hi Tori, you might be interested in this paper ‘Evolutionary psychology and Feminism’ by David Buss and David Schmitt in the latested edition of Sex Roles
http://utexas.academia.edu/DavidMBuss/Papers/738778/Evolutionary_Psychology_and_Feminism
Also my post on feministing here http://feministing.com/members/verbena/
Looking forward to the discussion.
Paula