The Age of Scientific Sexism

How Evolutionary Psychology Promotes Gender Profiling and Fans the Battle of the Sexes

Mari Ruti

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781628923810
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

We trust our sciences to operate on a plane of objectivity and fact in a world of subjectivity and cultural ideologies, but should we? In The Age of Scientific Sexism, philosopher Mari Ruti offers a sharp critique of the gender profiling tendencies of evolutionary psychology, untangling the insidious threads of various gender mythologies that have infiltrated-or perhaps even define-this faux-science. Selling stereotypes as scientific facts, evolutionary psychology continually brings retrograde models of sexuality into mainstream culture: it insists that men and women live in two completely different psychological, emotional, and sexual universes, and that they will consequently always be locked in a vicious battle of the sexes. Among these regressive arguments is the assumption that men's sexuality is urgent and indiscriminate, whereas women are "naturally" reluctant, reticent, and choosy-a concept constructed to justify masculine behavior, such as cheating, that women have historically found painful. On its most basic level, The Age of Scientific Sexism explores our impulse to "explain" romantic behavior through science: in the increasingly egalitarian gender landscape of our society, why are we so eager to embrace the rampant gender profiling that evolutionary psychology promotes? Perhaps these simplistic gender caricatures owe their popularity, at least in part, to our overly pragmatic society pragmatic society, which encourages us to search for easy answers to complex questions.

1

The Myopia of Men vs Women

Darwin conceived his theory in a society that glamorized a colonial military and assigned dutiful, sexually passive roles to proper wives. In modern times, a desire to advertise sexual prowess, justify a roving eye, and disregard the female perspective has propelled some scientists to continue championing sexual selection theory despite criticisms of its accuracy.

JOAN ROUGHGARDEN

1

When it comes to human relationality, evolutionary psychology has a standard narrative—one that has been repeated faithfully since Darwin. According to this narrative, romantic relationships amount to producing as many children as possible. Love, intimacy, and other details of emotional behavior are entirely secondary to the cold economics of reproduction. Gays and lesbians are evolutionary anomalies because their attempts to pass their genes onto the next generation are indirect at best.1 Straight men and women, in turn, are defined by their conflicting reproductive strategies. Forget about your family background, personal history, education, socialization, and unique existential dilemmas. If you’re a heterosexual man, your entire life—including your personality, goals, aspirations, and achievements—is determined by your need to spread your seed as far and wide as possible. And if you’re a straight woman, it all comes down to your ovaries, so you might as well stop worrying about having a personality, goals, aspirations, or achievements. Not only is your sole purpose in life to give birth to and take care of babies but you’re destined to become obsolete by the age of fifty. Indeed, by your mid-thirties, you might as well slip into your bathtub and slit your wrists because you’re nearing the end of your shelf-life.

This way of summing things up may seem extreme, but I trust that by the end of this chapter, the reader will understand why it does not violate—even if it, admittedly, mocks—the core beliefs of evolutionary psychology. Let’s begin with the basics. According to the standard narrative of sexual selection, “men court, women choose,” which means that just like a peahen chooses a mate from among the peacocks that display their decorated tails for her pleasure, and just like a female gorilla chooses from among the males who seek to impress her with their physical prowess, the human female chooses from among the eligible bachelors who devise ever-flashier ways to parade their investment portfolios, seaside villas, and sports cars in front of her. And the ability to play football, hockey, or other rough sports also helps (tennis and figure skating not so much, except perhaps insofar as they may make you rich). Some evolutionary theorists recognize that even poetry and humor might work on some women—that some women might prefer wit to hundred dollar bills. But the overall point of the standard narrative is that money (and high status) is what works on women.

Given that there may be some women who agree with this view, it’s important to be explicit about just how problematic the evolutionary line of reasoning really is: you see, because women merely choose from among the men who compete for their attention, there really is no need for women themselves to develop any of the characteristics that make a person romantically (or otherwise) appealing. In this sense, women are an evolutionary afterthought, a bit like Eve was God’s afterthought. Simply put, if you don’t have as much intellect, ambition, creativity, imagination, and general competence as men do, it’s because you don’t need these characteristics to fulfill your reproductive duty. After all, you won’t be the one supporting your family (or composing poetry, for that matter). As long as you’re young, pretty, and fertile, you’re golden. If anything, some of the more complicated human traits might actually get in the way of your evolutionary mission, which—let us recall—is to produce as many of those “good rapists” as your body can handle.

According to this ideology of eager males and choosy females, men will court a porcupine while women will defend their virtue at all costs. We are told that biology is destiny in the sense that more or less every aspect of gender differentiation arises from the simple fact that men have an endless supply of sperm whereas women have a finite number of eggs. This is why men are randy whereas women are coy, why men can’t get enough whereas women—unwilling to squander their precious eggs on just anyone—are the careful and chaste sex. The rhetoric of masculine randiness frequently reaches a hyperbolic pitch, as when Geoffrey Miller writes: “Typically, males of most species like sex regardless of their fitness and attractiveness to the females, so they tend to treat female senses as security systems to be cracked. This is why male pigeons strut for hours in front of female pigeon eyes, and why male humans buy fake pheromones and booklets on how to seduce women from the ads of certain magazines.”2 Is this what men in our society “typically” do? Good to know.

And women? When it comes to women, evolutionary psychology hasn’t come very far from 1857, when Lord Acton—a famous Victorian physician—declared that “the majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind. What men are habitually, women are only exceptionally … there can be no doubt that sexual feeling in the female is in the majority of cases in abeyance … and even if roused (which in many instances it never can be) is very moderate compared with that of the male … the best mothers, wives, and managers of households know little or nothing of sexual indulgences. Love of home, children, and domestic duties, are the only passion they feel”: “As a general rule, a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband, but only to please him.”3

2

Robert Wright begins his discussion of the differences between men and women in The Moral Animal by quoting most of Acton’s statement. He also seems to agree with Donald Symons who, back in the 1970s, expressed the matter as follows: “among all peoples sexual intercourse is understood to be a service that females render to males.”4 Wright admits that some modern women might hold a slightly different view on sex. But then comes his evolutionary punch line: “Still, the idea that there are some differences between the typical male and female sexual appetite, and that the male appetite is less finicky, draws much support from the new Darwinian paradigm.”5 This conviction about the divergent sexual appetites of men and women is repeated from one male-authored evolutionary tome to the next even as some female researchers, such as Sarah Hrdy,6 have worked overtime to show that it has no basis in the evolutionary record, including in the sexual behavior of our closest primate cousins. Men’s sexual urges, we are told again and again, are robust, irrepressible, indiscriminate, and ever-present; women, in contrast, don’t have a sexual bone in their bodies. For Wright this explains everything from the sexual double standard to the Madonna-whore complex (more on these below), and it also explains why, as he puts it, there isn’t a single culture in which women with unrestrained sexual appetites aren’t “regarded as more aberrant than comparably libidinous men” (45). Needless to say, he makes this assessment without any attention to cultural or religious ideology, or without being able to explain why women’s sexuality has been so strongly constrained throughout history. If there’s nothing to curtail—if women really are the asexual creatures that Wright and his colleagues portray them as—why bother placing so many restrictions on their sexuality?

Surveying the evolutionary literature on human sexuality, I repeatedly had the vision of a bunch of male scientists sitting around a camp fire and taking immense satisfaction in the idea that men are hypersexual studs who will screw pretty much anything that moves whereas women need to be persuaded with lavish dinners and pricey engagement rings (or, if all else fails, physical force). Acton might be forgiven for viewing women as pure creatures who weren’t bothered by sexual feelings of any kind. Likewise, Darwin might be exonerated for having bemoaned during one of his expeditions that he had “almost forgotten” what an English lady was—“something very angelic and good.”7 After all, we are all limited by our cultural contexts. But one has to wonder about the persistence of such archaic notions about female sexuality until the beginning of the twenty-first century. In their scathing critique of this aspect of evolutionary theory, Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá point out that it’s clear that evolutionary thinkers from Darwin on have been projecting the sexual norms of their cultures—as well as their own personal ideals about proper gendered sexual behavior—onto the evolutionary past, so that “the standard narrative is about as scientifically valid as the story of Adam and Eve … It hides the truth of human sexuality behind a fig leaf of anachronistic Victorian discretion repackaged as science.”8

Joan Roughgarden sums up the problem astutely when she states, “Contemporary sexual selection theory predicts that the baseline outcome of social evolution is horny, handsome, healthy warriors paired with discreetly discerning damsels. Deviations from this norm must then be explained away using some special argument.”9 Roughgarden’s book, Evolution’s Rainbow, not only catalogues the immense diversity of gender expressions and sexual practices found in the animal world but also outlines a variety of reasons for why Darwin’s theory of sexual selection—the theory that produces the archetypes of the ardent male and the coy female—is scientifically inaccurate even if his general theory of natural selection still holds. One of these reasons is that human mating, like animal mating, is not always primarily undertaken for the purposes of sperm transfer but rather to create and sustain relationships.10 That is, non-procreative sex did not, as Roughgarden puts it, await “the invention of condoms” (173). Moreover, females of many animal species, like human females, often initiate sex, and sometimes males are known to refuse. In addition, females do not invariably select males for their genetic quality. And there is plenty of evidence for female promiscuity. Finally, same-sex sexuality is common among animals as well as humans. “The sheer number of difficulties with sexual selection theory precludes plugging all the leaks,” Roughgarden reasons: “An occasional leak might be fixable, but this many leaks make repair impossible. The theory of sexual selection was taking on water long before evidence was found of widespread homosexuality, but homosexuality is the final torpedo” (171).

When a scientific theory “says something’s wrong with so many people, perhaps the theory is wrong, not the people” (1), Roughgarden notes. By now the sexual selection theory has to account for so many exceptions, so many counterexamples, that one has to wonder why it is still the dominant narrative both in college textbooks and evolutionary treatises aimed at the general public. Roughgarden explains that one reason is that evolutionary theory finds it difficult to account for diversity, which it tends to consider irrational. A second reason is that some evolutionary psychologists are invested in perpetuating “ethically dubious gender stereotypes that demean women and anyone else who doesn’t identify as a gender-normative heterosexual male” (172). A third reason, in Roughgarden’s blunt assessment, is “male hubris”: “According to today’s version, males are supposed to be more promiscuous than females because sperm are cheap, and hence males are continually roaming around looking for females to fertilize… . A male is naturally entitled to overpower a female’s reluctance lest reproduction cease, extinguishing the species” (167–8). If I quote Roughgarden extensively on these points—points that are obvious to anyone who surveys the evolutionary literature with any degree of critical aptitude—it is because I wish to show that we are not here dealing just with a battle between the humanities and the sciences but also with a battle between the defenders of (an obviously inaccurate) scientific status quo and other scientists who believe that scientific hypotheses need to fit the data rather than merely the ideological wishes of those promoting them; we are dealing with the need to think beyond normative social codes and on a level higher than a bedbug.

3

What is equally disturbing about the standard narrative is its conviction that men and women are destined to pursue mutually antagonistic genetic agendas, so that they won’t think twice about betraying each other. As Roughgarden observes, “The second contemporary mistake is elevating deceit into an evolutionary principle” (168). Ryan and Jethá in turn state, “Permeating the standard narrative of human sexual evolution is the depressing claim that men and women always have been and always will be locked in erotic conflict. The War Between the Sexes is said to be built into our evolved sexuality: men want lots of no-strings lovers, while women want just a few partners, with as many strings as possible. If a man agrees to be roped into a relationship, the narrative tells us, he’ll be hell-bent on making sure his mate isn’t risking his genetic investment by accepting deposits from other men” (269). This is an accurate synopsis of the field’s customary arguments, which consistently pit men and women against each other in a vicious reproductive conflict that can only end in mutual disappointment. The idea that men and women might have common interests—and that they might well prefer to couple up with those who share their values, goals, and basic life approach—seems completely foreign to many evolutionary psychologists, who appear strangely invested in proving that men and women are each other’s “natural” enemies. I find this especially bizarre given that the males and females of other species are not invariably portrayed as each other’s adversaries. If male and female bonobos generally seem to get along so splendidly, why are human men and women “naturally” so hostile to each other?

Because evolutionary psychology reduces intimate relationships to reproduction, its theories are as unromantic as they are inappropriate for modern, postindustrial contexts. Men, we are told, care primarily about the quantity of children whereas women—due to the fact that they are the ones who get pregnant, give birth to children, and usually also raise them—care about quality. Personally, I would like to meet the twenty-first-century American man who is dying to bring a thousand children into the world. Anecdotal evidence implies that he would be much more likely to want to prevent pregnancy than to knock up every woman he sleeps with. But, according to evolutionary reasoning, this doesn’t matter. What matters is that, regardless of what a guy consciously seems to want, he is driven by the same evolutionary imperatives that governed his ancestors millions of years ago; underneath the intricacies of modern romance pulse the same raw reproductive instincts that allowed his ancestors to survive and reproduce. As Wright asserts, the Darwinian view shows that “men (consciously or unconsciously) want as many sex-providing and child-making machines as they can comfortably afford, and women (consciously or unconsciously) want to maximize the resources available to their children” (96).

Wright admits that men’s affection for their children somewhat complicates the picture. But even the high MPI (male parental investment) found in human societies doesn’t, according to him, change the fact that the “basic underlying dynamic between men and women is mutual exploitation” (58). If men are driven to treat women as sexual and reproductive ATMs, women, the standard narrative informs us, strive to marry a meek, faithful sop with a hefty bank account while constantly looking for an opportunity to cheat with an aggressive alpha male with superior genes. The premise here seems to be that the tasty prospect of superior genes can tempt even the most reticent females to momentarily drop their coy ways. And they are especially likely to stray during ovulation when their chances of getting pregnant are the highest (note to self: if you’re going to cheat on your boyfriend, make sure to puncture the condom). That’s when they slip into a slinky outfit, spray on a gallon of perfume, paint their nails fire-engine red, put on six-inch heels, false eyelashes, and push-up bras, and head to the nearest country-music joint for a cowboy quickie in the filthy bathroom. When they get pregnant, they let their trusting hubby think that the godly child they’re about to give birth to is his, using his money to buy the most expensive baby-carriage they can find. After all, evolutionary psychology assures us that, outside the occasional steamy fling, female sexuality amounts to barely disguised prostitution: women exchange their sexual services for access to men’s wealth, status, and other material benefits. As Ryan and Jethá succinctly put it, “Darwin says your mother’s a whore. Simple as that” (50).

Women, then, only deign to have sex with their husbands—preferably as seldom and virtuously as humanly possible—because they want to secure a safe haven for their children. Men, in turn, aren’t genetically meant to settle down, buy a house, and mow the lawn on a regular basis no matter how much they try to convince themselves that they are capable of love. As Wright boldly announces, masculine feelings of love are a “finely crafted self-delusion” (66). Evolution, in turns out, is so cunning that it allows men to think that they are in love when in fact they are merely looking to exploit women. “Human brains evolved not to insulate us from the mandate to survive and reproduce, but to follow it more effectively,” Wright writes, so that “as we evolve from a species whose males forcibly abduct females into a species whose males whisper sweet nothings, the whispering will be governed by the same logic as the abduction—it is a means of manipulating females to male ends, and it serves this function” (53–4). That is, the “good rapist” and the guy who whispers sweet nothings to you during intimate moments are ultimately both after the same thing: they want to use you as a vessel for their genes. And males in high MPI human societies are the worst because they are capable of even greater treachery than males in low MPI species. In Wright’s view, ...

Table of contents

• Title
• Quote
• Contents 
• Introduction
• 1 The Myopia of Men vs Women
• 2 The Ideology of Gender Difference
• 3 The Arrogance of the Backlash
• 4 The Downfall of the Coy Female
• 5 The Cruelty of Optimism
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright