Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy (28 page)

But doesn’t this lead to the infamous “Kinder, Küche, Kirche”? This Nazi slogan about women means “Children, kitchen, church”—or, freely translated, barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen. No, and for most of human evolution, it never did. Montagu hated and fought this idea, and one of the first things he did in the book was to list women’s great achievements, brought up to date in
successive editions until 1999. For example, Nobel Prizes in science: Marie Curie, physics 1903, chemistry 1911; Irène Joliot-Curie, chemistry, 1935; Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, chemistry, 1964; Maria Goeppert Mayer, physics, 1963; and in physiology or medicine: Gerty Cori, 1947; Rosalyn Yalow, 1977; Barbara McClintock, 1983; Rita Levi-Montalcini, 1986; Gertrude Elion, 1988; and Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, 1995.

Today we can add: in physiology or medicine, Linda Buck, 2004; Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, 2008; Carol Greider and Elizabeth Blackburn, 2009; May-Britt Moser, 2014; in chemistry, Ada Yonath, 2009; and in economics, Elinor Ostrom, 2009. Each of these women came of age in a climate that ranged from somewhat hostile to starkly exclusionary and demeaning; few men who have ever won a Nobel Prize had to fight against such odds merely to get the right to study and maybe, just maybe, make a discovery. But most of these women did not only make a discovery; they founded new fields of science.

Montagu also listed nine women who won the Nobel in Literature; now there are four more. And he listed nine who won the Nobel Peace Prize, where we now have sixteen. It is beyond our scope to say what these women accomplished, other than this: theirs were among the most important human achievements since the start of the twentieth century, and they were made by people with one hand tied behind them. Or as someone said about the famous movie dance team, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but in high heels, going backward.

What Montagu meant was:
We have not yet begun to see what women can do.
“May it not be,” he asked, “that women are just about to emerge from a period of subjection during which they were the menials of the masculine world . . . in which the opportunities and encouragements were simply not available?” He went on to quote Oscar Wilde: “Owing to their imperfect education, the only works we have had from women are works of genius.” Wilde was a professional exaggerator, but there is more than a grain of truth here. Who
but the most inspired, the most impassioned, the most disciplined, the most willing to sacrifice, and the most truly gifted could win on such a steeply tilted playing field?

In the 1950s, Montagu had to contend with lingering “scientific” myths. For example, it was (and is) undeniably true that men’s brains are larger than women’s. But those who point to this size gap somehow forget to mention that it is relative, not absolute brain size that matters; clearly, bigger creatures have bigger brains. If size were all that mattered, whales would be much smarter than we are. What you do if you are serious is divide brain size by body size before you make your comparison. When you do that, humans have larger brains than whales, and women have larger brains than men. This latter difference is not great, but it is enough to slam the door on male smugness about brains.

We know more about the gendered brain now, and for the most part, the facts don’t favor males. For one thing, almost all common brain defects affect boys much more often. This includes autism (4 or 5 boys to 1 girl); intellectual developmental disorder, formerly called mental retardation (2 or 3 to 1); attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD (3 to 1); and conduct disorder (3 to 1). Psychiatrist and neuroscientist Thomas Insel, head of the National Institute of Mental Health, said in 2005, “It’s pretty difficult to find any single factor that’s more predictive for some of these disorders than gender.” In considering life-course-persistent conduct disorder (leaving out transient teen delinquency), the ratio is 10 or 15 to 1. These few persistently pathological individuals—less than 10 percent of us but doing half the crimes—are almost all male. Women have more emotional disorders, such as depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress, but even so, men are three times as likely to commit suicide as women.

None of these is a single-gene disorder, but in those, males again “win” hands down. That’s due to X-chromosome deficiency, which leaves a boy’s single X free to turn any adverse mutation into disease.
Girls are protected doubly, because they have two X chromosomes and because most of their cells inactivate one of them randomly; for them, normal genes in normal cells counteract most mutations. They would need extreme bad luck—the same mutation on both their X’s—to have the disorder, so X-linked conditions are far more likely in males, including congenital cataracts, color blindness, deafness, juvenile glaucoma, hemophilia, hydrocephalus (water on the brain), mitral stenosis (a heart valve defect), nearsightedness, and several neural defects and mental deficiencies, including fragile X syndrome, the second most common genetic mental impairment.

In addition, a remarkable 2012 study proved that the surplus of genetic defects long known to occur with older parents is mainly due to older fathers. This is because the mother’s eggs are produced before her own birth, while the sperm contributed by the father divides throughout his life, every division offering a chance for a new mutation. For babies with a mutation neither parent has (that is, one that occurred in the egg, sperm, or embryo), fathers contributed almost 80 percent; and the mutations rise exponentially with the father’s age. A thirty-six-year-old father passes on twice as many as a twenty-year-old; a seventy-year-old,
eight
times as many. This means that our history of polygyny and serial monogamy has contributed to many more mutations and defects than we would have had if young men had married women around their own age and stopped reproducing when their wives did.

Meanwhile, the biological resilience of women has led to a current life expectancy at birth of eighty-one for women and seventy-six for men in the United States. Women in their seventies outnumber their male age-mates by around 4 to 3, but by the late nineties it’s more than 2 to 1. This means more women are spending their later years without men, and most of them do just fine. By the way, the difference in life expectancy and the difference in health at all ages can make up for at least five years of career time committed to the “mommy track”; no one should be allowed to discriminate
against mothers. As Judith Brown showed in a classic study, women in cultures throughout the world have often gained influence after their children grew up, as with international leaders like Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, and Golda Meir, as well as American leaders like Sandra Day O’Connor, Nancy Pelosi, and Hillary Clinton. This list will greatly expand in the years to come.

Meanwhile, we must give up the illusion that men and women are the same. True, we are similar in many ways, and there is hardly a trait of human emotion or mind where we do not greatly overlap. But we must understand the ways the sexes differ and, especially if you are female, make no mistake about them. Ashley Montagu cataloged many ways in which women are biologically more robust and resilient; the complementary statement is that men must be biologically more frail and vulnerable. But there are darker traits, two especially, that Montagu didn’t dwell on, and I do. I will argue, too, that we cannot develop daughters into the roles for which they are destined—let us say for now that this means no more than true equality—unless they fully understand males and how males are different.

The two traits are violence and driven sexuality. Now, the former is sometimes needed, and the latter often is. But as we have already seen in the sad record of history, the excesses of male violence have been literally thousands of times what could ever have been needed, were it not for the fact of
other
males’ violence. Men have always been able to justify their violence by reference to that of their enemies. As for male sexuality, it has been, as Camille Paglia pointed out in
Sexual Personae,
one of the great sources of male creativity. But the way it normally (and I use the word advisedly) drives men’s actions, the way it becomes detached from relationships and affection, and the way it is often intertwined with violence make it a force that women should respect and fear. I hope at this point you will not take me to mean that they should allow that force to control
them; on the contrary,
they
must control
it,
and that starts with wary understanding.

As we saw in
chapter 1
, physical aggression, however measured, is greater in males than females. By age three in most cultures, boys are rougher and less nurturing than girls. In the United States, Raymond Baillargeon and his colleagues found the difference at seventeen months (aggression in 5 percent of boys versus 1 percent of girls) and saw it at the same level at twenty-nine months in the same children, which is not consistent with a learning hypothesis. This difference persists throughout growth and is greatest in young adulthood, as the frequency of the acts declines but they become more deadly. This is not because males hunted during our evolution. Predation has little to do with aggression, which involves different psychological states, uses different brain circuits, and deploys different actions. Predation in species from big cats to little rats looks like puzzle solving, athleticism, or play more than fighting, and human hunting involves none of the emotion that infuses interpersonal violence. The main use of physical aggression in nature is competition for resources, especially mates. Recall that one explanation for the invention of males is that females gained variation and quality by exporting risky rivalry to a sex incapable of creating new life.

There have been other proposed behavioral or psychological sex differences: in reliance on others for help; sociability; nurturance and affiliation; offering help and seeking companionship; and verbal and mathematical ability. Few have ever held up to scrutiny as biologically grounded. Judging from recent meta-analyses—sophisticated statistical summaries of many studies—most “sex differences” the average person can think of are not even real, much less biologically based. But findings have always been more consistent for aggression, nurturance, and sexuality; hundreds, if not thousands, of studies over more than half a century confirm them. In
chapter 1
we saw how hormonal development influences gender identity, even when
it is not typically male or female. This is evident in certain specific behaviors as well.

From adolescence, males have much higher levels of testosterone, females much higher levels of estrogen and progesterone—cycling monthly, steeply increasing if pregnancy occurs, and relatively suppressed during lactation, when prolactin and oxytocin are high. In experiments, testosterone increases or enables aggression in humans and many other animals, and male castration reduces it; the same hormone also disrupts normal mothering in females.

However, many species show sex differences in aggression
pre
pubertally, when sex hormones are at very low levels. Here we have to recall that in humans and other mammals, before or shortly after birth, males have high testosterone levels. These create sex differences in the hypothalamus; artificial early injection of testosterone masculinizes females. In addition, growing evidence shows sex differences in some other parts of the brain. With few exceptions, across primates and other mammals, males are consistently more violent—even in species where females dominate males. As for us, aggression by girls and women does exist, of course, but at much lower levels. In 2013 British psychologist Anne Campbell published an analysis of it, integrating evolutionary and neurobiological perspectives, and showed that it is an evolved characteristic built into the female brain but of a different nature and for different, limited purposes. Human males are more physically aggressive in all cultures at all ages. Socialization plays a role in this, and the outcome results from interactions between culture and biology. But today there is no reason to doubt that brain and hormonal development are foundational.

What about translating violence into war? I have already said, and I am not the first, that all wars are boyish. One of the most unsettling works of modern fiction is William Golding’s
Lord of the Flies,
a novel that recounts the descent into extreme bullying and
viciousness among a group of schoolboys isolated from adult supervision and forced to survive on a remote island. Could this happen in real life? A classic study called the Robbers Cave Experiment shed light on this question, using twenty-two typical eleven-year-old boys, all from middle-class Protestant families with similar education levels. The summer before sixth grade, the boys were placed in a camp in Oklahoma’s Robbers Cave State Park.

In the first week, they were randomly split into two groups. Rivalry was discouraged, and there were many joint activities. Despite this, the groups began to compete—they named themselves Eagles and Rattlers, insulted each other, and were hostile to rivals who entered their “territory.” Next, competition
was
encouraged. The groups vied in baseball, tug-of-war, tent pitching, skits, treasure hunts, and cabin inspections; trophies, medals, and four-bladed knives were awarded to winners. By day 3 of this phase, the initial good sportsmanship had been replaced by increased name calling, hurling of insults, and demeaning of the out-group. Soon, abusive stereotypes and negative attitudes toward the other group became crystallized.

In the last stage of the three-week study, the groups were blended again and assigned joint tasks; in one, they were told that vandals had damaged a water tank and they had to work together to fix it so all would have drinking water. Prejudice and conflict declined. In stage 2, when the boys had been asked to name their friends, there had been practically no crossover. But the split had largely healed by the end of stage 3. The boys went home with their biases behind them and friendly feelings restored.

Many experiments with adults in less dramatic controlled conditions show how easy it is to foster bias against arbitrarily created groups. Giving people frustrating experiences or lowering their self-esteem worsens prejudices. Artificially created bias can be reversed when groups are brought together again with appropriate interventions, but in the real world, enemies often stay apart. It is easy to
see how the grim process that played out at Robbers Cave in a matter of weeks might operate over generations.