Evolution doesn't justify sexism

Right, I am angry about something and wish to shout at the internet about it. This means of course that it is blogging o'clock.

The thing that has lately attracted my ire is an argument I've heard bandied about a lot lately. It goes something like this;

'Women can only have a limited number of babies in their life, so they only want sex a maximum of once every nine months, and what they've been programmed by evolution to really want is a man long-term to help protect them and their offspring. Men on the other hand can make a baby every time they get laid, and therefore are programmed to want to have sex with everything in sight, all the time.'

Ok, let's examine this. Yes, men and women have different dangly bits. Well done for noticing this. 

Top marks for observation there. 

What doesn't necessarily follow is that we are therefore psychologically hardwired to follow certain behaviour patterns. All that is necessary is to have evolved to be capable of working out what is in our own best interests. That's like saying we've evolved to be afraid of being run over by a lorry. Of course we haven't. We are simply capable of working out that being run over by a lorry is fairly unhealthy as hobbies go, and so avoid it if at all possible, electing to, say, play tennis or eat strawberries instead. In fact, one of the most remarkable features of human thought and behaviour, as compared to that of other animals, is how little of it is 'hardwired'. We  are born knowing very little of how to live. We are not like those gazelles that are up and running away from lions within ten minutes of leaving the womb. We learn how to think and behave in the world. We learn it from our parents, from each other and from our own bitter experience. It is our single biggest advantage and one of the foremost reasons our species has spread across the planet like a bad rash on a man wearing leather trousers on a hot day. 

Evolutionary theorists suggests that the most important thing we will ever do in our lives is have sex and make babies. It seems odd then that they would not consider the possibility that we would apply this ability to learn new behaviours and tactics to the most important thing we will ever do. By this I do not mean that we are capable of overcoming our underlying instincts because we're all civilised and whatnot now. I mean there's good reason to think that our underlying instincts might themselves be flexible and context dependent. We generally think of instincts as being very simple processes, like "AHHH IT'S A FUCKING TIGER RUN AWAY!". This of course makes perfect sense for a simple situation like the aforementioned stripy kitty with the big teeth. The correct response to that situation is fairly reliably going to be: run away very fast.

Mating however, is not quite that simple.

Which brings me to the other BIG and IMPORTANT thing about human behaviour, which is that we are, above all, and to a much greater extent than any other species, social animals. What decides how well a human gets on in the world is not how strong we are or how efficiently we have learned a few key behaviour patterns, but how well we negotiate the fluid, constantly changing world of interactions with other humans. In other words, how good we are at changing our behaviour based on what other people are doing.

Let me put it this way. Societies, even the smallest and most primitive ones, vary hugely in terms of how they interact with one another, share food and resources, rear children, think about relationships, etc, in response to their environment and finding the best way to live in it. Are you (yes you, hypothetical sexist evolutionary theorist by which I may or may not mean Steven Pinker*, sitting there with that hypothetically smug look on your face) really suggesting that people won't vary their mating tactics in response to these different social realities? Think about a small tribal society in which everything is shared pretty equally. Everyone has to co-operate to hunt large animals or travel safely around the forest to forage, and everyone eats their fair share of the catch and helps equally with the child rearing, washing up etc. A woman living there would gain no advantage from having a specific man to look after her and her offspring. In fact, it would be far better to have slept with every guy in the village, so they all think her kids might be theirs and try extra hard to look after them. Also this way she'll make sure she gets the best quality, most fertile baby gravy. It would be in her evolutionary interest to spend her time eyeing up men, having crude conversations with her friends about how best to get guys into bed and take advantage of them when drunk. The men, in response, may well then start being more interested in tying a lady into some sort of monogamous, committed relationship so they can be sure it's their babies she's having. Otherwise the only guy who'll get to have any kids is whichever one of them happens to have the biggest, strongest, steroid-pumped, sports jock style super sperm, the kind who kick over other sperm's sandcastles and then laugh as they walk off with a hot young ovum hanging off each arm.

Not that sperm have arms. Or sandcastles, I suppose. Shut up, it's a metaphor.

Anyway. The reason I chose this type of tribal society as an example is that this is probably our best guess at how things were for most of our evolutionary history. No-one could survive, let alone support a family on their own in a hunter-gatherer world. You depended on the community. If any mating behaviours are in fact hardwired, then 'tying down a husband to extract resources' probably won't be one of them, as this tactic only makes any sense at all after the invention of farming, less than 10'000 years ago.

My point is that our social realities change not just from society to society but from generation to generation and, increasingly, year to year. And those who can't keep up, because, say, they're 'hardwired' to a particular behaviour and can't learn new ways of doing things, are simply going to lose out. They will not be the ones having kids and therefore will not preserve their backward, outdated, rigidly hardwired natures into the next generation.

Of course, where women really do depend on their father or husband for survival then the 'withhold sex until he promises to marry you' tactic suddenly makes quite a lot of sense. Not because women and evolutionarily programmed to like fluffy things, getting married and doing housework, but as a last ditch attempt to secure a stake in society by playing the only card left them; their wombs. Try comparing dating culture in places like Saudi Arabia or rural India where being a single mother is a ticket to poverty, disgrace, social exclusion and in some places even death to places like Berlin and Sweden where there is good quality state sponsored childcare and little if any social stigma. How likely are you to get hit on by a woman in a bar in Saudi Arabia? How many demure German women do you know (as a side note to my female German friends, this should be taken as a compliment)? Whatever you think about the innateness of this or any other behaviour, it is clearly massively socially mediated as well.

So, to sum up. Having a vagina does not by itself mean you want a wedding ring on your finger. Having a vagina whilst living in a sexist society however can mean that you need a wedding ring on your finger for your very survival.

* Steven Pinker (2002) 'The Blank Slate', BCA London/NY, page 344, line 18