Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy (54 page)

298
Lionel Tiger’s
The Decline of Males
:
Lionel Tiger,
The Decline of Males
(New York: Golden Books, 1999).

298
France research shows sperm count decline:
M. Rolland, J. Le Moal, V. Wagner, D. Royere, and J. De Mouzon, “Decline in Semen Concentration and Morphology in a Sample of 26,609 Men Close to General Population between 1989 and 2005 in France,”
Human Reproduction
28, no. 2 (2013): 462–70.

298
Finland decline:
N. Jorgensen, M. Vierula, R. Jacobsen, E. Pukkala, A. Perheentupa, H. E. Virtanen, N. E. Skakkebk, and J. Toppari, “Recent Adverse Trends in Semen Quality and Testis Cancer Incidence Among Finnish Men,”
International Journal of Andrology
34, no. 4 (2011): E37–E48.

298
Denmark decrease in sperm quality:
Niels Jorgensen and eleven other authors, “Human Semen Quality in the New Millennium: A Prospective Cross-Sectional Population-Based Study of 4867 Men,”
BMJ Open
2, no. 4 (2012).

299
India study:
Madhukar Shivajirao Dama and Singh
Rajender, “Secular Changes in the Semen Quality in India During the Past 33 Years,”
Journal of Andrology
33, no. 4 (2012): 740–44.

299
About 40 percent of births are to unmarried women:
Brady E. Hamilton, Joyce A. Martin, and Stephanie J. Ventura, “Births: Preliminary Data for 2012,”
National Vital Statistics Reports
62, no. 3, September 6, 2013, accessed Sept. 14, 2014, at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr62/nvsr62_03.pdf.

299
Children will spend some time in single-parent households:
Gunnar Andersson, “Children’s Experience of Family Disruption and Family Formation: Evidence from 16 FFS Countries,”
Demographic Research
7 (2002): 343–64. The United States leads in these statistics, although Latvia is a close second.

299
Married women who outearn husbands:
Catharine Rampell, “U.S. Women on the Rise as Family Breadwinner,”
New York Times,
May 29, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/30/business/economy/women-as-family-breadwinner-on-the-rise-study-says.html?_r=1&, accessed Sept. 14, 2014.

300
Children with two mothers or two fathers:
Charlotte J. Patterson, “Children of Lesbian and Gay Parents: Psychology, Law and Policy,”
American Psychologist
64, no. 8 (2009): 727–36. See also Konner,
Evolution of Childhood,
329–34.

300
Complex impact of divorce on children:
E. Mavis Hetherington, “Divorce and the Adjustment of Children,”
Pediatrics in Review
26, no. 5 (2005): 163–69; E. M. Hetherington, “Social Support and the Adjustment of Children in Divorced and Remarried Families,”
Childhood: A Global Journal of Child Research
10, no. 2 (2003): 217–36.

300
Children’s resilience and protective factors:
Michael Rutter, “Annual Research Review: Resilience—Clinical Implications,”
Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry
54, no. 4 (2013): 474–87; E. E. Werner, “Vulnerable but Invincible: High-Risk Children from Birth to Adulthood,” supplement,
Acta Paediatrica
422 (1997): 103–05.

304
“The world’s gone social”:
Sandberg is quoted by Jenna Goudreau in “What Men and Women Are Doing on Facebook,” which summarizes male-female differences in social media use:
Forbes,
April 26, 2010, accessed Sept. 14, 2014, at http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/26/popular-social-networking-sites-forbes-woman-time-facebook-twitter.html.

304
“A woman is the child of”:
Laurie Goering, “In Lesotho,
Women Hope for Control of Their Lives,”
Chicago Tribune,
October 17, 2004, accessed Sept. 14, 2014, at http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2004-10-17/news/0410170377_1_lesotho-husband-s-permission-south-africa.

305
“Like a glacier”:
Helen Fisher,
The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How They Are Changing the World
(New York: Ballantine, 2000), 288.

For Further Reading

I
mportant predecessors of this book or some critical aspects of it are Margaret Mead’s
Male and Female,
Ashley Montagu’s
The Natural Superiority of Women,
Simone de Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex,
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s
The Woman That Never Evolved,
Laura Betzig’s
Despotism and Differential Reproduction,
Camille Paglia’s
Sexual Personae,
Helen Fisher’s
The First Sex,
Bobbi Low’s
Why Sex Matters,
Steven Pinker’s
The Better Angels of Our Nature,
and Hanna Rosin’s
The End of
Men.
This should not be taken to mean that these authors would agree with all my claims (I don’t agree with all of theirs), just that I have learned a lot from them that helped me write this book. On a sadder note and one on which there is no disagreement on my part, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s
Half the Sky
is a broad and moving overview of what is being done to help oppressed women throughout the world.

For an entertaining and reliable account of the evolution of sex, see Jared Diamond’s
Why Is Sex Fun?
And for the full range of animal mating systems and sexual proclivities, you can’t do better than the delightful, hilarious, and completely authoritative
Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation,
by Olivia Judson. Dr. T lets you know what you must do to succeed in the mating game if you are a fairy wren, a golden potto, a cockroach, or one of any number of other creatures facing the eternal puzzles of love and life.

An extended treatment of sexual orientation and identity in all their manifestations was not in the scope of this book. Joan Roughgarden’s
Evolution’s Rainbow
(although it contains an immoderate attack on the theory of sexual selection) is a fascinating and celebratory account of the variety of animal and human sex and gender arrangements, by a distinguished biologist who is herself an openly transgender woman with a moving personal story. It should be read in connection with the reviews in
Nature
by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and in
Science
by Alison Jolly. Gilbert Herdt’s
Third Sex, Third Gender
remains the definitive source on cross-cultural variation in roles for people who do not fit easily into the categories usually labeled “male” and “female.” One of the most illuminating—in fact, riveting—first-person accounts of gender is Norah Vincent’s
Self-Made Man,
in which she describes with great insight and compassion what she saw and learned in a year of successfully impersonating a man.

Although I see
Women After All
as a brief in favor of women, some will see it as a brief against men. To some extent that is inevitable, for two reasons. First, along with their many accomplishments, men have done a great deal of damage. Second, if women are superior even in some ways, then by definition men must be inferior in those ways. But I have said that there is good reason to worry about boys and men. It can be simultaneously true that (1) men have held and wielded most of the power in history and that (2) most men are not now and never were powerful. Other books have given attention to these facts, as well as to the particular vulnerabilities boys and men face as women’s power grows. Among these I recommend Warren Farrell’s
The Myth of Male Power,
Christina Hoff Sommers’s
The War Against Boys,
Lionel Tiger’s
The Decline of Males,
and Roy Baumeister’s
Is There Anything Good About Men?
Camille Paglia can always be counted on for a spirited and sophisticated defense of men, through easily available essays, speeches, and interviews (for example, in
Time,
December 30, 2013). I think of these views as a needed antidote to an idea I have not advanced and do not share: that men are all-powerful and mostly without value
.

Index

Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.

ABC News, 283

abortion, 240

Abraham, 164

Achilles, 98, 162, 163, 196–97

Ackman, Bill, 217

Adam, 163

Adams, Abigail, 188–89

Adams, Renée, 289

adaptive polyandry, 97–98, 100

adrenal gland, 27

adultery, 133, 139, 187

Advertising & Society Review
, 253–54

Afghanistan, 241, 274

Africa, 291

FGC in, 251–53

Agamemnon, 98

aggression, 29, 86

among bonobos, 115

among chimps, 115

male vs. female, 212

prepubertally, 213

see also
violence

agonistic buffering, 104–5

agriculture, 120, 145, 159, 174

birth frequency and, 150–51

health and, 149–50

patriarchy and, 155

polygyny in, 168

transition to, 146–47, 149

and warfare, 162

Agta (people), 142, 143, 158

AIDS,
see
HIV/AIDS epidemic

Aka (people), 143

alliances:

among baboons, 103

among bonobos, 113–14

among chimps, 110

Alliant Energy, 233

alligators, 70

Altmann, Jeanne, 108

altruism, 62, 114

Amazon basin, 147

ambiguous genitalia, 24, 27–28

American Anthropologist
, 154

American Revolution, 188–89

American Water Works Company, 233

amygdala, 117, 228, 229

“Ancient Asexual Scandals” (Judson and Normark), 59

androgen insensitivity syndrome, 37

androgens, 26, 27, 30, 35, 63–64

absence of, 37

and gender identity, 29–31

in lemurs, 97

prenatal exposure and, 29–31, 228

androgen toxicity, 26

Anestis, Stephanie, 93

Angela’s House, 260

Angkor Wat, 156

anglerfish, 66

Anthony, Susan B., 190

antibiotics, 53

antlers, 83

apes, 95, 106, 114, 121, 122, 124–25, 130, 274, 301

see also specific apes

Archer Daniels Midland, 232

architecture, 155

Ardipithecus ramidus
(Ardi), 122, 123

Argentina, 236

Aristophanes, 192

Aristotle, 187

Arjuna, 166

armed forces, women in, 232, 274–75

Armelagos, George, 149

army, 155–56, 169, 176, 179, 244, 257, 271, 274

Army Rangers, 274

art, 155–56

artificial insemination, 65, 66

Ashanti (people), 152, 168

Astaire, Fred, 208

Athena, 47–48

Athens, 156, 187

Atlanta, Ga., 259

Atlanta Journal-Constitution
, 261

Atmajaa
(Born from the Soul) (TV series), 240

attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), 209

Augustine, 181

Austen, Jane, 187–88, 189

Australia, 237

Australian aborigines, 127

Australopithecus afarensis
, 123

autism, 92, 209

Ayalon, Hanna, 264

Ayotte, Kelly, 283

Aztecs (people), 147, 156, 157, 168

baboons, 88, 102–5, 108, 113, 122

dominance among, 103

baby care, 75, 158

Baillargeon, Raymond, 212

Baldwin, Tammy, 235

Bangkok Post
, 244

Bangladesh, 241, 248, 254, 255–56

Ban Ki-moon, 251

Bao, Ai-Min, 228

Barbin, Herculine, 19–21, 24, 25, 27

“Bare Market: Campus Sex Ratios, Romantic Relationships, and Sexual Behavior” (Uecker & Regnerus), 221

Barnes, Joanna, 217

barn swallows, 78–79

Barra, Mary, 284–86

Barré-Sinoussi, Françoise, 208

Barry, Herbert, 204

Bashir, Omar al-, 271

Bathsheba, 165

Bauer, Gretchen, 291

Baumeister, Roy, 223, 226

Bayh, Birch, 274

Beall, Alec, 125

Beck, Anna, 234

Beltz, Adriene, 228

Benchmark Electronics, 233

Benin, 254

Berbesque, Colette, 130

Berenbaum, Sheri, 228

Better Angels of Our Nature, The
(Pinker), 180, 275

Betzig, Laura, 167

Bhagavad Gita, 166

Bible, 163–64, 169, 196

Biesele, Megan, 135

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 243, 246–47

biotechnology, 5

birds, 70

courtship feeding in, 79–80

pair-bonding in, 74–76, 82

see also specific birds

birds of paradise, 70

birds of prey, 87

birth attendants, 242, 243

birth control, 125, 191, 231, 241, 283

birth rates, 241

bisexuals, 225

Bix, Amy Sue, 264–65

Blackburn, Elizabeth, 208

black grouse, 82

Blackwell, Elizabeth, 190, 191

black widow spiders, 54–55, 302

blue-eyed black lemurs, 96

blue whales, 86

Blumenfield, Tami, 154

Blumenthal, Richard, 286

boars, 70, 76

“Body Time and Social Time” (Rossi & Rossi), 230

Boesch, Christophe, 110–11

Boko Haram, 257

bonobos, 62, 67, 111–18, 121, 122–23, 124, 129, 303

conflict among, 114–15

estrus in, 113

female control of male aggression in, 86

genome of, 112, 117

Boston, Mass., 189

botany, 49

Botswana, 246

brains, 3, 4, 7–8, 15, 29, 30, 32, 34, 45, 46, 62–64, 80–81, 90–93, 116–17, 119, 121–23