Nicholas Kristof tries to tease out the difference between sexism and misogyny, suggesting that instead of viewing the violence and oppression towards women through the lens of irrational hatred of women (misogyny), we should instead see it as a systemic attempt at control that uses violence and oppression as tools (sexism).
In contrast, the evolutionary origins of attitudes toward women were based presumably less on hatred and more on desire to control them and impregnate them, so as to pass on one’s genes. Acquiring and enforcing a harem, so as to improve the odds of one’s own genes being passed on, might involve ruthlessness, enslavement and brutal beatings, but there was no evolutionary incentive for gender hatred as there was for hatred of different tribes. And of course much of the anti-women behavior around the world, from genital cutting to bride burnings to sex trafficking, is typically overseen by women themselves, and it’s easier to see their behavior as opportunism or deeply-embedded sexism than as hatred of fellow women. So that’s why I wonder if sexism, in the sense of discriminatory attitudes toward males and females, isn’t a better way of thinking about the issue than misogyny, in the sense of hatred toward women.
Other anthropologists I spoke to also noted that the most discriminatory restrictions against women tend to come not from those who profess to hate women, but from those who profess to honor and protect them. Think of Afghan society, for example. After interviewing many men who beat and lock up women and threaten to kill them if they take a false step, I’d say that their attitudes for females are a mix of bizarre honor and contempt, but not usually hatred.
I see his point, but in my experience, the men who most rhapsodically talk about protecting women are often the first to turn extremely hostile if a woman presents any kind of threat to his dominance. And it’s not a cool-headed response, either. Men who are violent against women tend not to have the calm demeanor of someone issuing a bit of discipline, but are swept up in temper and hatred of the object of their violence.
In other words, I think that while Kristof is right that sexism, which is systematic, is the larger problem, I think misogyny is a tool that props it up. The contempt that men who espouse chivalry show towards women is misogynist in nature, and can easily graduate to violent hatred if the woman being “protected” agitates for any independence. The function of racism is useful as a comparison. Racism is a system that puts one race over another, but there’s no doubt that there are many racists who fear and loath the oppressed race, in part to justify to themselves the injustice of racism. In this sense, those of us battling the patriarchy have a plethora of words that clarify matters. Sexism is the systematic discrimination against women. Misogyny is the hatred of women that allows men (and women—who are often misogynists, as baffling as that is) to feel entitled to beat women, discriminate against them, and control them. The patriarchy is the word Kristof is looking for, which is the overall system of male dominance that’s aimed at controlling women in this specific manner, which is to control women’s sexual functions and funnel women into social positions that are in servitude towards men. The patriarchy also has set roles for men, and a pecking order for them. Kristof mentions harems in this article, but it’s worth noting that uber-patriarchies that have the rape-funnel system known as “polygamy” function not just to control women, but to create a pecking order of men. Only the patriarchs get lots of wives—men of lesser status are dominated or even expelled from the society. When people say “the patriarchy hurts men, too”, this is what we mean, and it does so in a way that’s a bit different than sexism or misogyny.
But I do get Kristof’s point about the word “misogyny”, which is defined as “hatred for women”, which seems a little off. I would actually characterize misogyny as “fear and loathing of women”, which is why a man who claims to be “protecting” women by depriving them of their freedom is a misogynist. And why women can be misogynists—the Ann Althouses, Dr. Helens, Charlotte Allens and sundry other misogynist women out there do feel that fear and loathing of women, and engage in sexist chatter to distance themselves from their own womanhood. Internalized misogyny is no joke—there’s a reason women suffer from eating disorders at much higher rates than men. The notion that the feminine is contaminating is widespread, and why you not only see women attacking themselves and other women for being uncomfortably female, but men also policing themselves and others for womanly behaviors and attributes.
Look at those T-shirts above, and you really see the relationship between sexism and misogyny, and why the former so often relies on the latter to work. The shirts are clearly sexist,* but they’re also based on conceptions floating around the fundie community that are misogynist—namely the idea that a woman who has had sex (read: controls her own sexuality and uses it for her own pleasure instead of preserving her body like it’s a car that hasn’t been taken off the lot) is contaminated and contaminating. There’s a reason they use the word “purity” to describe women’s virginity. Why are virgins “hot”? Because no self-respecting man wants to fuck a used vagina. Why are you a “future wife” if you’re a virgin? Because factory-sealed sells better than something that has been contaminated by being used by a former owner. These arguments exist despite cold logic. Cold logic points out that virginity is a cultural construct of little biological value, and that most non-virgins get married, to the degree that any given bride is exponentially more likely not to be a virgin than she is. But these facts don’t come into play—fundies peddle in visceral disgust, the fear and loathing of women that has no relationship to reality or logic.
I think misogyny is a critical part of sexism, more than the visceral loathing of people of another race is necessary for racism. Poverty and culture clash uphold racism, even if people are scrubbed of racial hatreds. But without the immediate control mechanism of misogyny, women basically have the same status as the men in their families and communities. Feminism was remarkably effective in a short amount of time for a reason—once misogynist control mechanisms like discrimination, reproductive control, and violence against women are lifted from women’s shoulders, there’s not so much to keep us back. Women, especially those with middle class privilege, have done remarkably well in a short period of time just by being given a much more fair shake. In fact, the dismantling of misogyny went so far as to turn into a gay rights movement at lightening speed, historically speaking. We have a way to go, in no small part because misogyny is everywhere and hasn’t been even close to eradicated. But there’s a much more direct line between women’s quality life and the dismantling of misogyny than there has been between the quality of life of racial minorities and the dismantling of open racism.
*I realize this is going to get disingenuous assholes to claim they’re not, so please don’t feed the trolls.
140 Responses to “Misogyny v. sexism v. the patriarchy”
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“In contrast, the evolutionary origins of attitudes toward women were based presumably less on hatred and more on desire to control them and impregnate them, so as to pass on one’s genes.”
wtf is he blathering about. What exactly does ‘evolutionary origins’ mean? Hellloooo….? Can somebody explain this to me please? And it better not be some handwaving social theory bullshit either. I want number, chemical reactions, biochemical pathways and chart. If I can’t do it in my kitchen sink, somebody gonna get a poking in the eye.
I swear, all sociologists should be shot, next to economists and lawyers. …and rightwing TV hosts. Bunch of Rasputins.
PS. and no. nature has numerous method of species reproduction. Collecting harem? What says NYTimes about ant and bee colony? (Or should we start going down the list of all higher order mammals social structure and mating ritual?)
The two need each other. Without the fuel of misogyny, sexism would forget why it’s bothering to enforce an elaborate and costly regime of subordination. Without the social support of sexism, misogyny would, for the misogynist, feel like a momentary impulse, not worth keeping. Emotions that never get any validation tend to atrophy.
Kristof’s distinction doesn’t seem to contain much of a difference. Even if the motivation to subjugate is based not on hatred (misogyny) but on evolutionary imperatives of control (sexism), it’s not long–like three seconds–before you hate those you subjugate.
I’v had conversations like this with supposedly pro-woman men - this shaving down of “misogyny” so that it only defines a certain set of feelings or actions. I don’t find that useful. If anything, it’s apologism - “let me make sure that the definition of misogyny is narrow, so that it’s harder for me to fall into!”
“Fear and loathing” is a good additional definition of misogyny. I also use “misogyny” to define the failure to recognize women as full humans, with agency and variety. For example, Nice Guys ™ who make wild generalizations about women to explain their own single status. Depictions of women as passive sex receptacles rather than equal sex partners. Any evo-psych-esque attribution of female decisions to her hungry or bleeding womb.
The Venn diagram of “women are from venus” misogyny (often practiced by women, too) and “fear and loathing” misogyny has a great deal of overlap, but the former also contains a lot of men who think they like and enjoy women.
A lot of men say “respect” when what they really mean is “fetishize.” They don’t respect YOU, they respect the idea of women in their heads. And when real-life women contradict their imaginary women, they get pissed.
It’s a subset of the “feminism is why I can’t get laid, I’m too nice for you modern whores” crowd.
A.
Here’s what I’ve been thinking about recently in terms of the difference. I’m sure someone else has come up with this theory. I’ve just never heard it before.
The way I’ve been thinking of it recently is that there are to varieties of oppression generally, categorical and intracategory.
Categorical is the patriarchal idea that women are by definition less valuable than men. (This box is better than that box.)
Intracategory is the idea that women who conform to the patriarchal ideal are more valuable than women who do not. (Fit in your box, dammit!)
So I think we can think of misogyny and sexism in this context. Misogyny is the hatred of all women regardless of who they are individually, so hatred of the entirety of the box. Where as sexism can be differentiated on the grounds that it is more about using social pressure to cram women into their boxes.
I realize that this feels like a false dichotomy when we think of it only in terms of women since you wouldn’t want to keep women in a particular categorical box if you didn’t hate them. But consider the similar situation of white men. Their box is clearly more valuable than our box, but they still feel societal pressure to fit into their box. And I don’t think anyone here can say with a straight face that society hates white men.
I don’t know how all this shakes out…as I said its a new idea I’m kicking around. If anyone knows someone who’s espoused a similar idea or eviscerated a similar idea I’d be happy to hear about it.
Awesome post.
“I spoke to also noted that the most discriminatory restrictions against women tend to come not from those who profess to hate women, but from those who profess to honor and protect them.”
I hate this dynamic more than anything else on earth.
Manufacturer of all boxes: rich old white men.
So I think we can think of misogyny and sexism in this context. Misogyny is the hatred of all women regardless of who they are individually, so hatred of the entirety of the box. Where as sexism can be differentiated on the grounds that it is more about using social pressure to cram women into their boxes.
I agree completely, but nonetheless, to me it’s tom-a-to, tom-ah-to, tom-a-to.
In contrast, the evolutionary origins of attitudes toward women were based presumably less on hatred and more on desire to control them and impregnate them, so as to pass on one’s genes.
Ok, he lost me right there. And not just because of the BS evolutionary theory taken as if it’s proven.
Seeing women as nothing more than wombs for future children, whereas men are fully human and entitled to control women = hatred of women. Period.
Manufacturer of all boxes: rich old white men.
I think that we all are manufacturers of boxes, the question is who gets to label them and how do we acknowledge and combat our dependance on them.
So it becomes- Beneficiaries of all boxes: rich, old, white men.
“After interviewing many men who beat and lock up women and threaten to kill them if they take a false step, I’d say that their attitudes for females are a mix of bizarre honor and contempt, but not usually hatred.”
“I would actually characterize misogyny as “fear and loathing of women”, which is why a man who claims to be “protecting” women by depriving them of their freedom is a misogynist.”
Why doesn’t “honor” + contempt, fear + loathing simply add up to hatred? How else would you define hatred?…
Why doesn’t “honor” + contempt, fear + loathing simply add up to hatred? How else would you define hatred?…
Because you have to know something really well to be able to properly hate it, and the whole point of modern patriarchy is for men not to have to know women at all.
I agree that misogyny is one of the attitudes that sustains sexism. To me, sexism is not necessarily intentional. Systems and institutions can be sexist, regardless of the personal beliefs and values of the people who participate in these systems.
Misogyny is an attitude. It exists in the thoughts and feelings of actual people. Misogyny is one of the many factors that contribute to sexism.
“Because you have to know something really well to be able to properly hate it, and the whole point of modern patriarchy is for men not to have to know women at all.”
See, that I disagree with.
As much of an ass as I think Orson Scott card is, I think he got that one right in the original Ender’s Game. It’s easy to hate something you don’t know. It’s much harder to completely hate something that you do know.
The dynamics of human violence show this to be true as well. Abusers - individuals and groups - spend a lot of time de-humanizing their victims. In other words, pretending that they know them even less than they really do. On the other hand, victims who know their abusers well often have a harder time putting the blame where it belongs. It’s much harder to only feel hate towards someone you trusted more than anyone else than it is to feel only hate towards the stranger in a ski mask. This is a big part of the reason why the myth that most rapes are stranger rapes still persists.
I think part of the trick here is the overloading of the word “woman” to mean both “the ideal of the feminine” and “people with vaginas”. Patriarchalists from Afghanistan to Goethe admire and honor their projection of what a Woman should be and act like, but that doesn’t necessarily say a lot about their treatment of the living, breathing kind. If anything, their rage and brutality toward actual women is a direct outgrowth of their idealistic (ahem) beliefs: the person-with-a-vagina who steps out of her assigned role is no longer a Woman but some weird monster for whom there is no name, and must be stamped out at all costs.
If I might riff a little, this combination of nominal admiration (plus more than a little fear and contempt) for the ideal with brutality toward real exemplars also plays itself out in antisemitism and certain kinds of homophobia (in particular, the kind that glamorizes drag and is completely squicked by gay marriage). Pre-WW2 european antisemitism was particularly fueled by assimilation — the idea that someone might look just like a “real” german or pole or frenchman but would actually be the Other. How scary (and hate-inspiring) must it be for the male-supremacists to live in a world full of people-with-vaginas who look — and sometimes act — just like the True Women of their fantasies but turn out to be nothing of the sort.
So the coexistence of “reverent” sexism and violent misogyny make a lot more sense if one considers them to be directed at two different kinds of creature who just happen not to inhabit two different kinds of body. Or something like that.
(The “virginity is hot” tee shirt creeps me out in particular, because it either says “cock-teasing is hot” or “disillusioning the innocent is hot” depending on your point of view. And both of those are such complete dangerous loser sentiments.)
A farmer doesn’t hate his livestock. Patriarchal systems are vile, but that doesn’t mean we can safely throw out nuance and fail to treat them as complicated.
It’s only “easier” to see it as a control issue “instead” of hatred if you’re, like, not a woman.
Control, contempt, all those words he’s using to say it’s not hatred…they ARE hatred, by definition and by the very expression of these attitudes.
Cramming someone into a box, by definition, is not a kindness. It’s not the right thing when you’re disciplining a CHILD–it’s hateful. It’s not the right thing to justify “disciplining” women under any circumstances, because women aren’t children. Seeing them as such falls under the umbrella of contempt, which falls under hatred.
Sorry, Nicholas. You fail.
Awesome post. I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently, as one of my fellow grad students is a conservative Christian and likes to brag about how it is his wife’s dream to have his babies and how they’re pure and not big Slutty McWhores like all other Americans.
Because you have to know something really well to be able to properly hate it, and the whole point of modern patriarchy is for men not to have to know women at all.
Not just modern patriarchy–traditional patriarchy as well. In the poetry that springs out of the courtly love tradition, women are stripped of their personality, of their humanity, and turned into china dolls placed on a pedestal, to be admired from afar but never actually, well, talked to. Look at the way Dante idolizes Beatrice but never actually communicates with her, as opposed to this idealized notion of female purity he turns her into.
Because you have to know something really well to be able to properly hate it, and the whole point of modern patriarchy is for men not to have to know women at all.
That doesn’t make sense to me. Would you say all the homophobic people who make sure to avoid getting to know any LGBTQ people don’t REALLY hate them because they don’t know them?
Cara: YES YES YES.
what a post. lots to consider..
another complexity in all this is the fact that masculinity defines itself as the absence of femininity…
it’s ok for women to wear pants like men (not everywhere) but it’s never ok for men to wear women’s clothes or to be feminine in any way…
i’ve always thought that creates a sort of automatic and unconscious contempt for women by men…men must oppose the feminine…or else!
I also use “misogyny” to define the failure to recognize women as full humans, with agency and variety
I think this is a crucial concept: too often, the issue seems to be the whole “women are some bizarre non-human species” that gets reinforced by every sit com’s “Son, let me tell you about [these odd creatures we call] ‘girls’” speech.
It’s not “hatred” and it may not even be “fear”, but that “othering” is a huge, huge issue. And I think it’s one that’s often overlooked, because it isn’t always negative stereotyping (c.f. “Asians are good at math”).
Is there a specific term for that? Positive sterotyping is way too easy to exclude from “misogyny”, and I think a lot of people would balk at using “misogyny” or “fear and loathing” for the whole “men are from earth, women are from Planet X” mentality.
I agree completely, but nonetheless, to me it’s tom-a-to, tom-ah-to, tom-a-to.
Maybe…but I was thinking that we spend a lot of time and energy trying to break down the (lets call it) Type 2 oppression (i.e., women can do whatever they damn well please). But (and I’m just thinking while typing - always dangerous) that the more serious problems of rape, domestic violence etc. are an outcropping of Type 1 oppression.
So maybe it’s useful to distinguish between the types because while we’ve made significant (IMO) headway against Type 2, we’re still floundering against Type 1. Perhaps because we haven’t distinguished it and dealt with it as a separate topic.
Seeing women as nothing more than wombs for future children, whereas men are fully human and entitled to control women = hatred of women. Period.A farmer doesn’t hate his livestock. Patriarchal systems are vile, but that doesn’t mean we can safely throw out nuance and fail to treat them as complicated.
That’s just…jesus…wtf?
Maybe the problem isn’t us throwing out the nuance, but you needing it spelled out for you.
I certainly don’t hate my laptop, but I’m not about to treat it like livestock, or anything else living, either. If, however, I started treating my livestock like I treat my laptop, I think we could safely say that I don’t care too much for my livestock.
When it comes to treating fellow humans with respect, there’s rarely a neutral “I don’t care” option. (Despite anti-social/introverted me wishing quite the opposite most of the time.) You either think other people are worthy of being treated as human….or you don’t. The latter is form of contempt. Period.
There are all sorts of reasons one may have for treating others with contempt. That very much includes thinking they are less than they are. From that comes the idea that treating them as less than they are is only fair/what’s best for them. But in the end, “what’s best for them” is always based on the idea that you think that they are less than they are. Which means that you are treating them with contempt.
er…bad blockquotes
Kristin, I’m wondering why it would be useful. To me, trying to separate Thing One from Thing Two is simply a way of giving misogynists an out. It’s a way to let them excuse themselves–”I don’t HATE women, I think they can do whatever they want, I just think they bring on all these rapes and assaults themselves.”
On the other hand, it might get through to a few on the edge who might be willing to see the light. Though I kind of doubt it.
I guess I’m just too stupid for such subtle distinctions. If someone considers me an inferior being, and treats me as property, and uses violence to keep me in place, I’d tend to label it “hate”. If not, what exactly constitutes “hate”? Or to put it another way, if that’s just “contempt”, I can’t imagine how brutal it would be to be on the receiving of “hate”.
“And of course much of the anti-women behavior around the world, from genital cutting to bride burnings to sex trafficking, is typically overseen by women themselves, and it’s easier to see their behavior as opportunism or deeply-embedded sexism than as hatred of fellow women.”
Much of the anti-woman behavior around the world is overseen by other women? Really? Okay, that’s cool - I guess I’m free to walk around the city or take public transportation late at night - there aren’t very many women out that late, so I ought to be safe. Sex trafficking overseen by women? Sure, women are sometimes involved - money is money. Women can and do exploit girls and women. But it seems that overwhelmingly the sex trafficking and slave auctions are overseen by men, from most of what I’ve read about it. (Not to mention the ‘clients’.) Please, if anyone would like to present evidence that their are more female-owned brothels and female pimps than male - well, good luck. And, of course, organized crime must surely be primarily controlled by women for this to be true.
othering-objectification-hatred
aren’t those just points along a continuum? The problem is that we often think you can’t “hate” someone if you just see them as an object, because the world connotes some passion, even a kind of respect. (and I think hate directed upwards, from members of a subordinate class to members of a dominant class, often does have a passionate, angry element to it. But hate directed downwards can be expressed clinically with no passion at all, because the culture makes it so easy– men can find ways to communicate the message “I hate women and despise them” twenty times a day without having to get angry at all.)
anyway, if you define hating [x] as “taking pleasure in the suffering of [x]”, which I think is as good a definition as any, then i think it’s obvious that misogyny=hatred.
One of the commenters at LG&M put it succinctly: Sexism is the method, misogyny is the motivation.
“world connotes”
should be “word connotes”
thought i’d better correct that typo, it might be genuinely confusing.
I have two words for Mr. Kristof:
Negative dialectic.
(Couldn’t resist, sorry).
So…
Eve : Mary,
whore : virgin,
gutter : pedestal
::
abuse : patronize ?
In my personal experience, misogyny (at least on an individual level) works as follows:
1. Man believes strongly in a hierarchy by which men are superior to women and women ought to be grateful for any crumb of attention or inclusion by men.
2. Man desperately wants to have sex with woman.
3. Woman declines to talk with man in bar, declines to date him, or declines to have sex with him.
4. Man feels totally humiliated that a mere woman has “control” over something he desparately wants and that she won’t give it to him. After all, what does it say about him that this pathetic creature (the woman) won’t slaver for his attention and advances? He rationalizes away his humiliation by deciding that there is something wrong with her — i.e. she is a tease, a power-hungry bitch, an evil temptress, etc. etc.
I think that sexism and misogyny feed each other. On the one hand, in the scenario I outlined above, the man’s misogyny is a product of sexist beliefs, i.e. the man’s belief in his superiority over woman. On the other hand, I think a lot of sexist systems may stem from men’s desire to prevent sexual rejection from women. In some parts of the world and even in fundie subcultures in the U.S., women are deprived of sexual autonomy so that women are never in a position to “reject” a man sexually, at least not without another man (i.e. daddy) being involved in the decision making process. In secular modern cultures, this issue is handled by trying to convince women that we desperately need male attention because the marriage market is so terrible, that our sell-by date is approaching quickly, and that there is nothing worse than dying alone with your cats.
Kristin, I’m wondering why it would be useful. To me, trying to separate Thing One from Thing Two is simply a way of giving misogynists an out.
Mmmm…good point…I guess to me, I don’t find Type 2 to be less morally reprehensible than Type 1, so I don’t see it as a “way out.” Doing either makes you a morally bankrupt human being.
My thought was more along the lines of clarifying the discussion, particularly in the case of rape and violence against women.
Perhaps if we could clarify, that rape is a crime indicating a deep hatred of women in general and not necessarily the woman who was attacked, then we wouldn’t engage in all this stupid victim blaming.
Not that I don’t think feminists are trying to do just that, but rather, that perhaps we need a clearer theoretical basis from which to argue because so far we haven’t been all that successful.
Does that makes sense…as I said…thinking + typing = stupid arguments but I’d rather have a stupid argument shot down that continue thinking stupid things.
I saw this essay by Kristof and it just sort of underlined for me why I find him so deeply creepy. For a supposedly feministish journalist he’s *obsessed* with the sex trade. So it’s no suprise, really, that he buys into all the evo psych garbage (and can they please stop calling themselves anthropologists: they know NOTHING about human variation, and are fulla crap besides. If biology won’t have them why should we have to take them?).
The whole story line then becomes about the inherent tragedy of the inherent war between the sexes, which is *not* liberatory or progressive, just masturbatory and disgusting. This guy is NOT on our side.
Who is the “we” who needs to clarify, and who is the “we” who engages in victim-blaming?
I think feminists have been crystal clear in saying that rape is a misogynist act. Society as a whole isn’t too clear on the concept, primarily because it IS a misogynist act and is therefore *okay* on some level. (Also, who wants to listen to crazy man-hating feminists?
). I think lumping the whole thing together is clearer than trying to separate them.
Separating hatred of individual women from hating all women is the whole problem with sexism in the first place–people think they aren’t sexist because some of their best friends are women, etc.
I think this guy’s over-analyzation obfuscates the topic. People in general aren’t clear on the concept because of institutionalized misogyny (internalized or not).
I think that has much more to do with middle class women simply having more resources. Once women had a chance to go to college, middle class women had the resources to do so. Once African Americans had a chance to go to college, most of them did not have the resources to do so.
“Then in the reporting for this column, I spoke to evolutionary psychologists who emphasized the distinct origins of racism and misogyny/sexism. Racism seems based in a hard-wired tendency of ancient humans to divide into groups to improve odds of survival, and it was an evolutionary advantage to be able to identify strongly with your own tribe and to fear or kill members of other tribes. That may be why even very small children — even infants — draw racial distinctions or other in-group/out-group distinctions.”
tada… just remove the guy already before he does his “bell curve” type of publication.
My take: NYTimes are basically a fucking racist publication. Time to dig their archive and document it. Bunch of up town twits.
Athenae is right as far as nerds and geeks go. But I assume even men with whom women willingly have sex can be misogynistic.
The “Future Wife” T-shirt reminded me of the Emma Bunting character in Clerks II.
Maybe Kristof did this in order to overly occupy people while he embarks on a far more nefarious plan, like knocking over a liquor store. The fact that one of his terms cannot be pronounced or defined but by 1/10th of the population makes his scheme particularly delicious.
Squashed — right on. He’s wack on sex and wack on race. He gets to lament how sad it all is while also affirming its total inevitability. He’s not, not, not an ally.
Rather than arguing about what does and does not count as “hate”, I’ll just say that kali @10:49am was making the kinds of distinctions I was advocating for.
I’m with mickle. WTF!?A farmer doesn’t hate his livestock, therefore, a man who equates a person with a vagina as livestock doesn’t hate women?
Just a thought … but could an examination of gay men’s attitudes toward women perhaps shed some light on this topic vis a vis the differences between sexual/reproductive/etc motivations, on one hand, and hatred/fear/loathing of women, on the other? Does that even make sense?
Cara,
I was referring to society of course.
Like I said…feminists get it…non-feminists…not-so-much.
Separating hatred of individual women from hating all women is the whole problem with sexism in the first place–people think they aren’t sexist because some of their best friends are women, etc.
I guess the problem I see is that by lumping it all together people who don’t fall into the “women have to stay home and raise babies” category don’t realize they still have a problem that needs to be worked on.
I’m thinking particularly of a dear friend of mine (he’s really a nice person - I swear - he just has this one mental hiccup and I have never ever seen him treat another human being with anything less than full agency) that I’ll call G.
G thinks that sexism/misogyny means that you think women have to act in a certain ways. G thinks that since he believes women should do whatever they want that he doesn’t have a problem with misogyny.
What I couldn’t seem to get through his (peanut) brain is that rape, the prevalence of rape, and our inaction surrounding rape, and victim blaming are indications of institutional misogyny. Not a couple of violent assholes…a society of assholes.
But when I reframed the issue as described above noting the parallels between his own experience as a minority (therefore categorically inferior) and an atypical man (therefore intracategorically inferior)…he got it.
But of course, one anecdote does not make a pattern…
My evil futuristic proposal,
genetically engineered a bacteria that can rewire Kristoff brain receptors. See what he says after 60% of his brain interconnect is scrambled and randomly reconnected. See what he has to say about evolution. lol.
..hmm, I wonder what is the theoritical possibility of that sort of project.
an examination of gay men’s attitudes toward women
My sister once worked in an accounting department with three other people, all gay men. Even though they knew it grossed her out, they would spend Monday mornings discussing their weekend’s sexual exploits in great detail. (She told me she did not need to know what “fisting” entailed.) I would say this “boys’ club” lack of respect for her boundaries was misogynistic.
Stephen — I think you are mixing up two levels of analysis — personal motivations and society-wide structural ones. Just look, to take a really pop (&, I’ll concede, stereotypical), at fashion design. Lots of gay men, lots of systemic hostility toward women. Fashion (nor gay men) didn’t create that hostility; fashion is just is a super-saturated part of a society already saturated with, yes, misogyny. This is , btw, another reason why Kristof’s “it’s about reproductive imperatives!” explanation is misleading.
Norbizness: hee! Kristof’s column is such pure wankery that I suspect you may be right.
Honestly, this is such bullshit. If it were all about controlling women out of rational, amoral self-interest–if it were “nothing personal,” in other words–then PREGNANT WOMEN wouldn’t be at such a huge risk of abuse from their own boyfriends and husbands, abusers wouldn’t beat traditional and fecund wives, “whore” would be a descriptor and not an insult, there wouldn’t be such personal and hateful expressions of disgust towards any woman whose picture appears in a magazine or newspaper and who is not 100% airbrushed, men wouldn’t have such issues with their mothers and powerful women who remind them of their mothers (99% of the Hillary-hate, IMO) since those women are usually past breeding age and are irrelevant for harem-related purposes…
I think the roots of misogyny are psychosexual, not evolutionary. And Kristof’s a hack. It ought to be obvious to anyone with eyes that there’s a lot of personal, emotional, venomous hatred towards women.
Oh, and I’d just like to add that the comparison to livestock is completely misleading. Beating and confining a human being–someone with a mind and emotions like yours–is very difficult to do without hatred, for most people. Writings and laws from misogynists make it clear that they do realize that women are humans, with the full panoply of passions and ambitions and flaws that entails. Livestock can’t communicate with you verbally. Women can.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn3488-worlds-first-brain-prosthesis-revealed.html
Any device that mimics the brain clearly raises ethical issues. The brain not only affects memory, but your mood, awareness and consciousness - parts of your fundamental identity, says ethicist Joel Anderson at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri.
The researchers developing the brain prosthesis see it as a test case. “If you can’t do it with the hippocampus you can’t do it with anything,” says team leader Theodore Berger of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. The hippocampus is the most ordered and structured part of the brain, and one of the most studied. Importantly, it is also relatively easy to test its function.
The job of the hippocampus appears to be to “encode” experiences so they can be stored as long-term memories elsewhere in the brain. “If you lose your hippocampus you only lose the ability to store new memories,” says Berger. That offers a relatively simple and safe way to test the device: if someone with the prosthesis regains the ability to store new memories, then it’s safe to assume it works.
Model, build, interface
The inventors of the prosthesis had to overcome three major hurdles. They had to devise a mathematical model of how the hippocampus performs under all possible conditions, build that model into a silicon chip, and then interface the chip with the brain.
No one understands how the hippocampus encodes information. So the team simply copied its behaviour. Slices of rat hippocampus were stimulated with electrical signals, millions of times over, until they could be sure which electrical input produces a corresponding output. Putting the information from various slices together gave the team a mathematical model of the entire hippocampus.
Not to mention the fact that institutionalized misogyny itself dictates what’s “rational” (what men do) and what’s “emotional” (what women do).
LadyV, you said a lot of it’s personal–I think it’s ALL personal. There’s just no other reason for it. Otherwise the patriarchy would just disappear in a puff of logic.
LadyVetinari April 9, 2008 at 11:49 am
Norbizness: hee! Kristof’s column is such pure wankery that I suspect you may be right. ”
It’s wankery to the highest order. Consider this:
- organized farming
- organized army
- nation state
- organized religion…
etc etc. all these are complex organization that can alter the fundamental functioning of society (nevermind how a person think) Yet the oldest in it are only few thousand years old, some are only few centuries old.
I don’t know what type of evolution he is talking about, but it’s only 3-4 generation in short end, 30 - 40 in bigger organization. kinda hard to see how evolution can happen in such a short time.
but then again, NYTimes is an institution able to consistently produce high class liars . They must have some sort of breeding program inside their compound.
Foolish: try Malaysia.
It’s simply ALL men.
“men who most rhapsodically talk about protecting women are often the first to turn extremely hostile if a woman presents any kind of threat to his dominance.”
Absolutely, positively 1000% true.
I bet many farmers would start hating their livestock if it started talking, striking, demanding rights, unionizing, demanding autonomy, or otherwise interfering with the fairly-comfortable thing the farmers have going on based on their accepted dominance.
A significant characteristic of the “patronizing” section of misogyny is that the respect/liking they proclaim for women is dependent on the women’s acceptance of the rules and deference to men. The reason this qualifies as misogynist is that women are NOT livestock, or dolls, or children; we are fully autonomous people with our own wants and needs, and yet men and culture demand that we ignore/reject this fact in order to get the basic respect due to any human being.
They can say “I like women.” They can say “I respect women.” They can say “I love women.” But what they’re doing is taking what’s deserved simply for being human, and dangling it like a carrot that you have to jump for. They deny rights in order to make them privileges and thus demand a price for them, and simply by doing this, effectively deny the status of women as fully human.
Kyra April 9, 2008 at 12:12 pm
I bet many farmers would start hating their livestock if it started talking, striking, demanding rights, unionizing, demanding autonomy, or otherwise interfering with the fairly-comfortable thing the farmers have going on based on their accepted dominance.”
not to mention call 911 for abuse.
Well, at least there are understandable reasons for believing sexism isn’t personal. Having the power and privilege to treat women as chattel is cool in a dashing villain sort of way. Hating women because they don’t want to sleep with you/make you feel weak and unworthy is simply pathetic.
“Stephen — I think you are mixing up two levels of analysis — personal motivations and society-wide structural ones.”
OK, fair enough … but I was actually thinking that specific instantiations of said “society-wide structural” motivations in people with completely different and opposite personal motivations might shed some light on the nature of those “society-wide structural” motivations and their origins.
Like I asked at the end, “Does that even make sense?” I guess the answer is, “No!” But hopefully this at least clears up a little bit of the original, poorly worded question … or not!
What Kyra and squashed said. Livestock that don’t go where they’re herded are pretty universally diagnosed as sick or crazy or evil, and either beaten into compliance or killed. If the farmer depended on those livestock for cooking of meals, raising of children and sexual gratification, and it was known that an animal that had behaved just fine for years could “turn” at any moment…
“… two levels of analysis — personal … and societ[al] …”
And on a final note, I’m not at all convinced that such distinctions are, ultimately, valid. I think perhaps that the societal informs the personal — and vice versa — to the point that it can be impossible to completely disentangle them. (And also, the distinction — like all strict dichotomies, IMO — is constructed and, hence, is artificial. Such distinctions are certainly useful in the context of discussion and debate, and they are tools that can be used to clarify complicated points and positions, but they shouldn’t be treated as absolute reflections of reality in any sense — again, IMHO.)
Stephen April 9, 2008 at 12:33 pm,
And on a final note, I’m not at all convinced that such distinctions are, ultimately, valid.”
It should be seen as frame of thinking type of distinction. Ultimately it’s a polite way of saying “boys will be boys.”
If I read him correctly: It’s biological. Can’t help it if boys are mean/nasty/want all the woman. It’s how evo biology junk theory is saying. It’s all very scientific… really.
So, next woman start blathering about “right” or demanding this or that change. Out come the article.
… It’s basic old skool “retaining status quo” by conjuring dubious theory stuff.
The only way to disprove this is to actually alter their brain permanently. It always been like since the beginning of time. Smack it with a club, beheading, overthrow, guillotine, … etc. I for one think putting electrode in his head will be very entertaining.
connected to wireless button on the net. everybody got to zap his head every time he says something stupid.
endless entertainment.
I hate people who say weirdly stupid things because I end up thinking about them a lot. Which is what I’m doing now.
I think I’ve found the real main hole in Kristof’s column, the thing that makes it such shoddy, sloppy, thinking: having a “rational” reason for hatred doesn’t make it any less hatred. ALL hatreds start out with a “rational”-seeming reason.
Kristof himself says that race-hatred starts with the evolutionary need to fight against different groups (which is probably bullshit, but I’ll accept it as a given for the sake of argument). Okay. But he understands that it’s still hatred, that its evolutionary origins don’t make it any less so.
Yet, at the same time, he claims that the (supposed) evolutionary origins of sexism indicates that it’s not about hatred. But why would this be? Even if we accept that anti-woman cultural elements come from men’s desire to control reproduction, couldn’t we just say that the HATRED of women has an evolutionary basis, in much the same way that race-hatred does?
Because it’s clearly hatred. There’s nothing that humans have said or done about other groups that they haven’t said or done about women within their own group (with the possible exception of total extermination), so you can’t argue that woman-hatred is less hateful than race-hatred based on the words or actions it inspires. So you’re left with arguing that anti-woman structures can’t be hatred because of their origins, which are evolutionary (so Kristof claims)…except that racist structures ALSO have evolutionary origins (again, so he claims) and he is willing to admit they’re hateful.
Shoddy reasoning. Lazy thinking. Typical NY Times, in other words.
It’s possible to be racist without being an unreconstructed Klansman. Racism can be a function of thoughtlessness. E.g. people who have such an impervious sense of entitlement that they don’t realize that they are doing any injustice to anyone.
Why are they so oblivious? Maybe because deep down, they discount the humanity of the Other. But maybe it’s because the system is configured so that the people at the top are shielded from evidence of inequality. The people on the bottom aren’t allowed to complain, or if they do, there are filters to make sure that the people at the top aren’t too discomfited.
By the same token, it’s possible to be sexist without feeling overt hostility or contempt towards women.
I think it’s a mistake to argue that all forms of prejudice and discrimination are variants on gut-level hatred. Sure, you can define “hatred” to include any kind of subordinating or discriminatory attitudes–but that misses the point.
One of the reasons that so many people are impervious to their own prejudice is because they convince themselves they can’t be prejudiced because they don’t feel the kind of visceral hatred that supposedly defines racism/sexism/homophobia, or whatever.
LadyVetinari April 9, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Kristof himself says that race-hatred starts with the evolutionary need to fight against different groups (which is probably bullshit, but I’ll accept it as a given for the sake of argument). Okay. But he understands that it’s still hatred, that its evolutionary origins don’t make it any less so.
I give you one argument that will end all argument related to this. (unpleasant one)
Iraq torture. All those young women, seemingly nice middle america type of gal. Well, nice picture next to those corpses and the dog leash.
Where is the evo biology theory in there?
It’s in the training and culture.
tlsintx is onto something I think. Masculinity primarily defines itself as the absence of femininity. I like to think of masculinity is a tiny, pretty, porcelain ballerina on the edge of a shelf, ever so delicate and always threatened.
If masculinity is so tough and powerful, how come it needs to be sheltered from any tiny breeze or rumble, as though it will hit the floor and shatter into stardust?
Squashed: excellent point. Abu Ghraib was sexual assault, but somehow that escapes people’s notice.
Lindsey: I don’t think anyone denies what you’ve said. I think the problem is the claim that misogyny/sexism is somehow inherently less hateful than racism/xenophobia/whatever.
Seebach: I like to think of masculinity as being the psychological counterpart to the testicles. One kick to the testicles and a man is in serious pain. Similarly, one sharp verbal/psychological threat to masculinity and devastation ensues.
I think I see why he’s trying to make distinctions, and I don’t fault him for the attempt.
If I were to try to break this down, I would say that sexism is the fundamental structure that keeps the patriarchy propped up while misogyny is the almost inevitable by-product of sexism.
A patriarchal system creates a very explicit model for how control and power should be wielded and passed on from generation to generation. Sexism (along with racism and other forms of discrimination) are the tools that enforce that power structure. I think you could make the argument that if we had some dystopia where every person conformed strictly to the roles dictated by the patriarchy, there would be no hatred.
Of course, we don’t have that dystopia (thank the flying spaghetti monster!). We have a system where humans actually try for growth and rebel against societally imposed roles. And that’s where misogyny kicks in. Misogyny (and other forms of hatred) are the inevitable reactions of the system when any individual or group resists its power.
In other words, misogyny is the symptom, and patriarchy is the disease.
I find it useful to think about structures like this, but I sympathize with those who dispute that it makes a difference. Day-to-day, at the personal level, it makes no difference. It’s all miserable.
They can say “I like women.” They can say “I respect women.” They can say “I love women.” But what they’re doing is taking what’s deserved simply for being human, and dangling it like a carrot that you have to jump for.
I started to write a comment disagreeing with this statement, but as I wrote it out, I realized it actually was the same thing:
When someone says “I respect women”, what they are actually saying is “I respect some artificial construct that I believe each individual woman should adhere to.” Maybe the follow up thought is the key, here:
If the follow up thought is “and I will only respect those individual women who adhere to that construct”, that’s clearly misogyny, and just a rephrase of the comment quoted above.
If the follow up is “but I am still able to respect individual women as individuals whether they adhere to that construct or not”, then you’re probably looking at “sexism”: “All women should be X, but I can relate on a personal level to individual females who are not X”.
Or is that a distinction without a difference?
short. end-of-break, not-read the thread comment:
I’m not aware of any evidence whatsoever that pre-agricultural, gatherer-hunter, people were systematically either sexist or misogynistic, whatever distinctions one draws.
I suppose this or that band may have had such customs, but to argue an “evolutionary”, in the biological sense, tendency, one needs to show it is the norm and not something that occurs sporadically here and there.
GH economics put no premium on sexism; anthropology shows no examples of “harems” that I am aware of among pre-agricultural peoples.
Wapsie’s list of dichotomies above is exactly how I would distinguish between sexism and misogyny. I don’t like saying one is the system, the other is the emotion, because both of them have emotional and systemic elements. Instead, I see them as matched halves: sexism controls women who ‘behave,’ misogyny punishes women who don’t. That’s why patronizing “but I love women” sexists slide into misogynistic rape threats so quickly. abuse : patronize indeed!
Yes, exactly. This is a huge flaw in Kristof’s column and in many pop evo psych bullshit explanations. To steal a phrase from another blog, evolution produces adaptation-executers, not fitness-maximizers.
“It’s possible to be racist without being an unreconstructed Klansman. Racism can be a function of thoughtlessness. E.g. people who have such an impervious sense of entitlement that they don’t realize that they are doing any injustice to anyone.”
The problem with this theory, Lindsay, is that there are rather few men out there who don’t have women around them a good portion of their lives. Most men even live in the same household as a women or multiple women. Unlike white folks, who may go years without ever having social contact with *insert minority here,* or may go their entire lives without ever living in close contact with anyone but other white folks.
mark,
I am not aware of any anthropolgical studies citing “harems” either but if one wants to argue the norm, going back 10 or 20 thousand years or so I still buy into the argument (I forget who originally made it and worded it far better than I will here) that females have always wanted control of their sexuality and reproduction and do so by choosing who they will have sex/reproduce with. Males have the same drive, to control reproduction, the difference is the only way for a male to control reproduction for a long time was to control the female. A lot of the problems we’ve had throughout history come from that.
OT: I read an article that says one way to alleviate this fear, not being sure if the child is yours since you don’t control the female, is to mandate paternity testing of all newborns. I think that would have a lot of horrible ramifications but its out there.
What Lyndsey B. said. The explanations of racism, sexism, whatever in some kind of story about our evolutionary history are le self-exculpatory crap. They let you lament something while simultaneously suggesting change is impossible. It’s like me stepping on your foot and then weeping copiously about your inescapable mashed-toe situation.
Jamespi — note how that explanation first posits *TWO* equal and oppositive evolutionary imperatives existing independent of social norms, and then second — without blinking — goes on to blithely assert that in the course of human history one simply trumped the other. THEN, in part the third, that explanation has the effing gall to call itself grounded in nature and not society.
Ie,it sails right through the social bit and then still calls itself “natural”.
It’s exactly like the Underpants Gnomes, or a shell game.
Keep your eye on step 2, or risk falling for a lousy trick.
After interviewing many men who beat and lock up women and threaten to kill them if they take a false step, I’d say that their attitudes for females are a mix of bizarre honor and contempt, but not usually hatred.
Love is Hate.
(Seriously, raised in a patriarchal house full of “chivalrism” and anti-feminist Christianity and inherited atheistic evo-psyche anti-feminism as well, this “we control you/beat you/punish you/cripple you b/c we love you” is what made me a) write off the idea of male-female love by the time I was 12, b) decide never to marry or fall in love myself, c) coin the phrase “protection is a racket” as my silent inward response every time someone blathered on about “protecting women and children”…it’s positively Orwellian, just like the Christian redefinitions of “love” and “kindness” and “compassion” that allo for autos-da-fe and Hell eternal.)
For a good idea of what close siblings misogyny and racism are, I cannot recommend enough Thomas Carlyle’s awful book “The Nigger Question.” It was written at the height of the British emancipation struggle by a very prominent and nationally adored writer, and later became a manual for the cause of extending American slavery. It’s considered a huge black mark on Carlyle’s otherwise stellar reputation as a writer.
The heart of the rant is very similar to antifeminist thought - he proposes that blacks are lazy and frivolous, and if left to their own devices will plant all the wrong crops and ruin trade in the West Indies. He argues that the slavery provides them with the structure they need to be decent human beings. Hell, he even throws in a few compliments about the black slaves’ appearance in an attempt to deflect accusations of prejudice.
After seeing how closely the two arguments align, I came to the conclusion that “misogyny” isn’t a bad word at all to express what we’re opposed to. If we’re going to accept that it’s hateful to say that blacks are inferior and need white rule, there is no reason that saying women are inferior and need male rule shouldn’t be considered hateful as well.
Also, the whole “males just NEED to be sure their offspring are their own, can’t help it” evo-psych thing falls apart when you look at other forms of social animal organization - it ignores the problems of FEMALE biological breeding needs/options, and doesn’t work that way for, frex certain whales, where the whole pod works as one big family with everyone (male or female) looking out for each other’s offspring rather than competing to benefit merely their own direct progeny.
I mean, you could look at a society where the women kept some men for stud and gelded the rest for labor purposes and come up with the exact sort of evo-psych BS rationalizations based on “evolution” and “biological imperatives” as this…
I know from talking to a few guy friends, their first reaction to feminism has universally been distrust of me, fear, and strangely, a feeling like their genitals are being threatened. I went to go see the vagina monologues with one friend and his girlfriend, and he said his “dick felt weaker” after. It’s like equality is a threat to their sexual potency. I was surprised to get the same reaction from very stereotypical football loving guys as from artist-types.
kathleen,
Good stuff, I didn’t look at it that way. As far as that theory -blithely- asserting one trumped the other…have male perogatives on reproduction not trumped the female ones for most if not all of human history? I didnt mean that society has no role in it, I’m not saying its 100% biological or anything and I apologize if my summary of the theory was poorly worded. I think it is that the need or want to pass on ones genes is a given for more than 50% of the population, the means by which to do that is what society has influenced.
Can you do me a favor and explain how the two imperatives are independent of social norms, which social norms? I’m not nearly as well spoken and would value your take on it.
Bella- Why does it ignore it? From what I see, its not ignoring it, simply overriding it, therein lies the problem. Females throughout human history indeed have their own wants and motivations, it just seems to me that society has taken the wants and motivations of males as a way to subjugate females.
Banis- I see that all the time, somehow they are less for another group gaining towards equality. As a stereotypical football guy I always found it laughable, equal, strong passionate women are amazing. I think as men get older some, hopefully more as time goes on, cast off the gender role our society gives them and begin to value themselves and others equally and truly begin to enjoy life. In my experience I will date a self-idenfied feminist over an anti-feminist every time, both for idealogical and sexual reasons.
(0 sarcasm in this post, questions are earnestly asked)
That is, in fact, what makes the patriarchy so strong. Men and women are taught from infancy not to recognize the treatment of women in a stereotypical household as injustice. “Of course” the woman will give up her career to raise the kids. “It’s only natural that” the more resources and education go to male children, who will have families of their own to support someday. Women who protest against such injustices on a daily basis are “whiny” or “hysterical” or “bitter”, and certainly not subjects of pervasive oppression. Not only that, they sit around eating bonbons at home while their husbands work hard.
Someone who came from M and saw the division of labor, responsibilities and privileges in a stereotypical patriarchal household would have no trouble identifying it as injustice, but someone who has been conditioned to it from infancy doesn’t see a damn thing, because they’ve been taught to look the other way, and never taught to see clearly.ars
tlsintx is onto something I think. Masculinity primarily defines itself as the absence of femininity. I like to think of masculinity is a tiny, pretty, porcelain ballerina on the edge of a shelf, ever so delicate and always threatened.
Not to take anything away from tslsintx, Seebach (especially since I agree with theory), but credit where it’s due:
Virginia Woolf (A Room of One’s Own) and Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex) both posit this, and both are going back to Hegel and Heidegger–the latter partly through Sartre.
Interestingly, Woolf was mostly an essentialist and Beauvoir a Constructivist, but they certainly meet on this, as well as some other things.
There I go typo-ing up posters’ names again. Sorry, tlsintx.
It’s funny Realityfighter should mention this — I’m currently reading David M. Oshinsky’s Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice, and it certainly struck me how the descriptions of black people were directly analogous to descriptions of women (the “good ones” look a certain way and are helpful, polite, and submissive), and how what Oshinsky calls “racial etiquette” functions analogously to the social conventions governing (even modern) male-female interactions (even down to the similarities between discouraging social contact between groups and violence used as a last — or first — resort against nonconforming members of the oppressed group).
That said, the book is heavily male-centric (one would expect so, but even still). I’d be interested in reading a similar book on the historical experiences of female convicts in that time and place.
jamespi — I just meant that part one of ev psych theory says, here are two reproductive imperatives given one sex that can produce lots of offspring if circumstances allow and one sex that can only produce a few even given ideal circumstances (given that pregnancy and child-rearing are quite time-consuming).
that’s independent of society because one could posit it for any large mammal.
Ev psych *then* says, “and that’s why men’s reproductive strategy is to control women, voila, life as we know it”
Notice how that puts all the causal force on the male side of the equation. Men controlling women does indeed seem to be the pattern all human societies we know about have followed, but that’s a *problem to be explained* rather than an explanation!
Working from that starting premise alone, it could have gone differently, right? The female side of the equation just as plausibly could have produced what bellatrys suggested, but didn’t — why not?. Or both imperatives could have interacted to produce something else but didn’t — why not?
Instead, society as we know it does look to be structured around that “male imperative” alone in ways that feminist theory is devoted to puzzling over. to skip that major middle part, and then to say one has an explanation of society based in nature, is three card monte, not science.
There are three possible conclusions: one, that the starting premise about the two divergent imperatives is wrong. Two, that the “middle bit” about society is under-explained. Three, some combination of one and two.
It follows that livestock farmers and non-vegans have contempt for animals.
it certainly struck me how the descriptions of black people were directly analogous to descriptions of women (the “good ones” look a certain way and are helpful, polite, and submissive),
Still continues today in a more subtle extent…look at how conservatives expect Clarence Thomas, Condi Rice, etc. to “behave” even in the rarity that they bring them under their wing. (One of the reasons JC Watts left politics is that the GOP leadership was reportedly very “patronizing” towards him.)
Yeah, I tend to find distrust and defensiveness is the first reaction guys have when talking about structural sexism. It’s particularily weird to me, since the American feminist movement has been non-violent.
I have noticed that patience is a virtue: you put the seed in, eventually their eyes do open up.
LadyVetinari: testicles is better than the ballerina, honestly. The pink ballerina frame takes advantage of misogyny to decry it.
However, telling basement neocon bloggers they’re protecting a porcelain trinket seems more satisfying.
Kathleen,
Wow, thanks. That was a great explanation. I’ve heard that ev psych theory before and it appears thats what I was describing in my OP but what I was getting at was not that one sex can have tons of offspring and the other can have relatively few. My point was that human males seem to have a vested interest in being absolutely certain the child is biologically theirs. I understand that if there had been a different model of bringing up children that wouldnt have been the case but thats was my larger point, the biological urge to procreate, or at least screw because it feels good, combined with the apparent mindset of the earliest of societies results in the way things are now.
It could have gone differently and the way you restate the question is awesome but I just dont see it going any other way. Just as the whales mentioned were one example, male animals killing rivals during the mating season/when the female is in heat to ensure their genes are the ecarried on is another. If I remember correctly, and this may have been thrown out long ago, the very shape of the human penis is somewhat an indicator in as much as some posit that the shape is the way it is to deliver sperm but also to take any sperm already there out thereby ensuring that males genes get in.
I will bow out now of this discussion as its a bit over my head but I appreciate your input kathleen and others, have a wonderful day.
Kathleen,
Wow, thanks. That was a great explanation. I’ve heard that ev psych theory before and it appears thats what I was describing in my OP but what I was getting at was not that one sex can have tons of offspring and the other can have relatively few. My point was that human males seem to have a vested interest in being absolutely certain the child is biologically theirs. I understand that if there had been a different model of bringing up children that wouldnt have been the case but thats was my larger point, the biological urge to procreate, or at least screw because it feels good, combined with the apparent mindset of the earliest of societies results in the way things are now.
It could have gone differently and the way you restate the question is awesome but I just dont see it going any other way. Just as the whales mentioned were one example, male animals killing rivals during the mating season/when the female is in heat to ensure their genes are the ecarried on is another. If I remember correctly, and this may have been thrown out long ago, the very shape of the human penis is somewhat an indicator in as much as some posit that the shape is the way it is to deliver sperm but also to take any sperm already there out thereby ensuring that males genes get in.
I will bow out now of this discussion as its a bit over my head but I appreciate your input kathleen and others, have a wonderful day.
Kristof is one of those rational people who assume, as a matter of course, that other people are rational too. He knows there are good reasons (i.e. rational reasons) for men to want to control women, so he tends to give the irrational reasons short shrift. If he were motivated to try to control women (though he’s not) he’d be drawn that way by factors comprehensible to reason. There’s probably no telling Kristoff that there are lots of people will do things out of visceral repulsion, angst, and disgust. His head doesn’t operate thataway. Why should anybody’s?
I absolutely do not buy the idea that what we call misogyny is merely the end result of a game plan concocted by a bunch of guys intent on making the most of the hand God dealt them. Too much energy is invested in misogyny for that to be the case. If you establish a religion, some part of it will end up dedicated to the denigration of women; if you found a state, entire phalanxes of people (many of them female, puzzlingly enough) will appear between one breath and the next and will begin to recite arguments to the effect that women will bring about the ruin of your state if they’re allowed any level of participation in it. The women’s clothes which are officially admitted to be cool are through some strange coincidence exactly the clothes that most women can’t fit into. Women’s movies are movies not about women but about the niceties of women’s standing in relationship to men. And so on.
I don’t want to oversell the idea of an intrinsic male fear and loathing of women because misogyny is scarcely an exclusively male bailiwick. Lots of women are misogynists and many men aren’t. Whatever the reasons for misogyny are, it’s very real; and it often impels both men and women to act against their own best interests. The infuriated Middle Eastern father who has his daughter killed for consorting with a boy from the wrong tribe has sacrificed any chance he would have had of having his genes passed down through her. And though she’d never possess the champion biological seed-spreading potentialities of her brothers, her kids would have been as much their grandfather’s descendants as would the children of their uncles. But her father obliterates all that potential when he makes sure of her death.
It’s rational for men to want to hoard women as a biological resource. But misogyny, and customs which are based on it, can prompt men to give up that resource. Permanently. This makes no sense in terms of the context Kristof proposes, but it does make sense if one posits that there’s some kind of an emotional burden carried by both sexes which finds its expression in injuries done to women. It would be interesting to find out what give rise to this impulse: I would like to see some real research done in this area; but, unfortunately, what we get instead are studies devoted to proving that men who’ve been distracted by cooch pictures are less diligent in keeping track of their money than they might otherwise be. (Who’d-a thunk?) But then if anything is rational it’s the impulse to sally forth and prove something everybody already knows.
(FWIW, I regard misogyny as the theory and sexism as the practice, if you know what I mean. But that’s just my way of categorizing things.)
“I like to think of masculinity is a tiny, pretty, porcelain ballerina on the edge of a shelf, ever so delicate and always threatened.”
Excellent imagery, but I suggest you make it into a porcelain figurine (”Action figure!!!”) of a football player in that one-knee-up-cradling-ball-while-stiff-arming pose. Fragile, oh so fragile, but appearing tough.
( similar to http://www.plaxx.com/detail.aspx?ID=2213)
Other anthropologists I spoke to also noted that the most discriminatory restrictions against women tend to come not from those who profess to hate women, but from those who profess to honor and protect them.
However, Marvin Harris (for one) sees a correlation between the level of sexism in an (agricultural) society and the type of technology it uses - the more food production values brute strength, the more sexist the society is.
Possibly not convincing, but enough to suggest that sexism is a sociological phenomenon based on, but not determined by physical facts rather than an evolutionary mechanism.
back for one quick hit, interesting visual on masculinity, how do you see femininity?
PiatoR — I’d really like to see a rigorous metric for sexism. I mean, we can all have notions of where we think a society “falls” on some sort of sexism scale, but those kinds of arguments (agriculture of type X correlates with sexism of level 12.46 on the Cootienator) always make me wanna roll my eyes. The fundamental “human story” question is not why some societies have (supposedly) more or less of it, but why all societies have at least one metric ton of it per square person (I measured).
gah, back, kathleen is not PiatoR’s post a possible explanation for why all societies have at least a history of having a metric ton of it? replace agriculture with say seafaring and fighting, like the vikings, or especially agriculturally based societies that did not have the benefit of beasts of burden such as north and most of south america. to take from PiatoR, the more X (activity deemed essential by the society) values brute strength, the more sexist the society is/becomes. native americans from the pacific northwest didnt need agriculture or to hunt and from what ive read about them they were less sexist than some other tribes that placed a higher value, for whatever reason, on things requiring more brute strength. do you think feminism would have advacned anywhere near as much as it has in the states if the day to day working lives of the vast majority of Americans hadnt changed significantly since say the 1890’s? Not sure i entirely buy it all but it is interesting. Off to work, a good night to all
The whole thing would be super intriguing if either side of it were measurable such that a correlation might become demonstrable.
(1) sexism - what is the unit of measure? Beatings? Fear of contamination by girl goop? What? What is the unit?
(2) brute strength — again, what is the unit of measure? Number of times men say “Arggggh, matey” on a pirate raid? Number of bears they wrassle in a given summer? Granite monoliths erected per religious epoch? Pyramids built by slave labour? And what about slave labour? There’s some brute strength hardly being used to oppress anybody. Dang!
no, I am afraid these theories are what we call silly, unfalsifiable hoohah.
Please people stop blaming anthropolgy for the bullshit evo-psych put out!!
When it comes to anthropology, its interesting to look at our primate family members and see the various sex-based groupings (look it up) and maybe imagine how our very far back ancestors may have lived. However I think (and I may be wrong) that most serious physical anthropologists care much less about making inferences from those groupings to todays uber-complex societies. And thats were evo-psych gets it wrong, or is possibly misinterpreted; There may be an evolutionary basis for some types of behaviour, but due to manner in which our societies have become so much more complex, and our intelectual and social thought become more advanced, the evo-psych arguements just simply NO LONGER APPLY!
Maybe some 50000 years ago there was good reason to favour your tribe of closely related members over another, but it doesn’t work that way anymore! And it most certainly does not apply in the case of sexism either. Thats were Kristoff definetly goes wrong, todays problems are rooted in the patriarchy and fear/hatred of the other, not in some tribal/reproduction based fight for survival.
Basicly, Evo-Psych often forgets to mention that we’ve become a bit more sophisticated in thought that our homo-erectus/ earlier sapien ancestors. And then proceeds to generalize and make excuses for the cro-magnum level intelectuals among us who want to prop up the patriarchy and racist ideologies.
BTW, I’m studying medical anthropology right now, so hence the hurt feelings. Most anthropologist are in it to improve the human condition (in the case of cultural anthro) or find out where we came from and prove those misogynistic religious nutters wrong about creation! But theres always a few bad apples oout there, so give us a chance!
:D
Straight up, ladies and gentlemen, if a woman is making me happy as a man, why should I give a damn about how she treats other females? In fact, even if a woman is NOT making me happy as a man, why should I give a damn about intra-female politics? Wise is the man who realizes that female interactions is more like a woman’s purse than her vagina: they’re both full of mysteries but what you discover in the first is far less pleasant than what you discover in the second.
Some of it, I think, is just religious and cultural variation. For example, the bishop or pope or someone had to BAN women and children from the battlefield in Ireland in the sixth century. So, even if you compare the Celts to those with similar levels of technology, the Celts thought all people belonged on the battlefield, and many other cultures did not. Also, the Icelandic Vikings had a system under which women could leave their husbands (and men their wives) and take their property with them. So high-status women were actually treated very well. They were not expected to fight or join in Viking raids, but there are a few stories of women taking up broadswords and smiting people to avenge their family’s honor, and they were respected enough that someone bothered to eventually write the story down.
So I think this “long history of women being oppressed” view comes out of the fact that two of the major history-obsessed eras were the Greeks and the Victorians, who were deeply sexist. They seemed to write a lot of very intersting women straight out of history. And interesting cultures, as well. God, if you wiki women and military history, you’ll learn that all kinds of cultures were placing women on the battlefield.
Someone needs to write the gendered version of ‘guns, germs, and steel.’ I think it is just pure dumb luck that the dominant modern Western cultures are sexist.
One way I’ve found to deal with misogyny — and of course it’s not a complete solution since misogyny is systemic throughout our cultural system — is to apply certain boxing principles to the matter.
First we take the insight that patriarchal modes of thinking are basically irrational. That is important to recognise. Secondly, when we encounter some poor soul afflicted with this debilitating illness that we call patriarchy, we do not make any efforts to get within their range, but instead compel them to come over to us, if they want to make contact. (This saves valuable energy — a resource that should never be underestimated.)
Finally, as the coup de grâce, we permit the patriarch to work very hard to try to get through to us with his ineffectual logic and poorly trained communications skills. We do not come over to him by presuming to understand anything about him. We make him work for his results. All failures in social skills and basic logic will be refuted with a swift parry (and if we are in the mood, a counterattack.) But never, ever, waste energy in trying to figure out what the poor soul “really means”, because that plays into the effect of his one and only tactic (he wants us to unravel the crude mystery that constitutes his life) — and apart from that he is a poor human being (and a poor fighter).
As far as making sure the kid is yours– wouldn’t the damn civilized thing be to TRUST the person you claim to LOVE? And to value ALL children?
Otherwise, jamespi, you might as well be a lion and kill babies in the hopes the mother will mate with you.
We humans have morality, cooperation, altruism. We don’t let orphans starve. Why should women be treated like chattel to ensure proper ownership of babies? Strip away pretty words and that’s disgusting .
it’s ok, ranylt.
i didn’t remember it was virginia and simone, among others…credit due, indeed.
love the pretty porcelain ballerina theory, too. (h/t seebach)
PiatoR — I’d really like to see a rigorous metric for sexism.
Mmm, that was one of the problems I had with Harris’s comment. I’ll see if I can dig out the original column with cites at some stage.
(2) brute strength — again, what is the unit of measure?
In this particular case, he tried tying it to agricultural techniques. Bend and stoop labour, for example, doesn’t require testosterone fueled muscle, but some forms of plowing do. He was less convincing when using it as a basis for an explanation of gender monopolies over non-agricultural animal husbandry.
I know this is hyperbole, but I must defend the honor of sociologists and lawyers. I generally despise evolutionary psych/sociology, because of the haven for misogynistic men who claim that everything selfish men do is to make babies and isn’t that really all we ever wanted?
But sociologists come in all flavors, and so do lawyers. Where would we be without the ACLU’s lawyers? The NAACP’s lawyers? NOW’s lawyers? Greenpeace’s lawyers? The law is a tool that can be used to achieve a multitude of ends (kind of like the Bible!). I think we should fight stereotypes not only about women and ethnic groups, but occupations as well. (I can’t speak for economists, though, because the ones I’ve met are all goo goo ga ga for Thomas Friedman Flat Earthism and it makes me ill, but there have to be sensible ones out there)
Except, of course, that when marriages and children are part of economic and political maneuvering there may be no claim of love, and even if there is, it may not get you very far.
What’s interesting to me is that, historically speaking, there has been much more interest in controlling female reproduction in cultures where wealth is based on scarce physical capital of some kind (rich farmland or fishing grounds or mines etc), because that’s a asset that you want to go to your genetic heirs. In other cultures where wealth is based on human labor without regard to the scarce physical capital there has been relatively less craziness about controlling women’s reproduction and, through that control, who gets to inherit some particular piece of land or shoreline or whatever.
I’m really glad a bunch of you piled on to analyze the Kristoff article, because as soon as I got to the evolutionary origins of attitudes toward women were based presumably my brain shorted out from the white-hot rage. You cannot imagine how much it annoys me to have people use “evolutionary” in this kind of slap-dash, self-justifying way.
In particular, I want to applaud bekabot @ 95. As a Real Evolutionary Biologist™, one of the striking aspects of human reproductive behavior is how counter-biologically-intuitive much of it is. Female infanticide is the most extreme example.
It looks to me as though the goal of most human reproductive behavior is not, in fact, biological reproduction. The goal is *social security* in its broadest sense. That’s why people in a variety of societies will kill daughters, who are biologically a safer bet than sons. (And why increased social security can undo this practice in places like Korea.)
In most human societies, the goal of marriage is not children or sex, but the economic support of adults by exchanging woman’s work for man’s work. The goal of children isn’t biological reproduction or gene transmission, it’s someone to support you in your old age.
I think bekabot is right:
I don’t know enough about non-misogynist societies to say what that burden might be, and how to move away from it — but I bet it *can* be done.jamespi, it is obvious to me that you are well-meaning and not anti-feminist, so I’m sure you will realize that when I say this, my intent is to educate you: feminists do NOT want to hear about your “taste” in women. We are all socialized to think that a man telling a woman that he desires her sexually (or otherwise approves of her) is a compliment of the highest order. Feminists rightly consider this to be horseshit. When I, as a feminist woman, see a comment such as yours, I feel as though I have just been shoved right back in the box where I am defined by my (sexual) appeal to men. It pisses me right the fuck off.
The more you know!
derrp gets the medal for Gentlest Redirection of Internalized Privilege of the day.
I would LOVE some literature on the counter-biologically-intuitiveness to use as evidence in counter evo-bio arguments I get myself into (from anyone who comes across this request). Usually I just end up smashing my skull against a brick wall when people say things like “but men make sperm till they die and women only have like 5 eggs.”
“It follows that livestock farmers and non-vegans have contempt for animals.”
Well, yes, if one assumes that livestock farmers and non-vegans are treating animals as less than they are.
I would think, however, that no matter which side of the divide one is on that question, it should be damn obvious that treating animals with contempt/hatred is not the same thing as people with contempt/hatred.
Although, the lack of such awareness would certainly explain PETA’s favored tactics.
I once read advice that, in a political context, if you hear someone use the word “protect” you should mentally replace it with the word “control”. Doesn’t usually let you down.
This has been a really useful and enlightening thread for me, especailly the discussion of the livestock analogy. Thank you to all.
I apologize derrp, as you noted in your post I did not intend to upset anyone. I understand completely what you’re saying and will avoid that type of statement in the future on these blogs, I’ve just gotten used to using that kind of logic, that empowered, confident people are sexier, in the arguments I have with my male, mostly military bretheren to get them to see the light. sometimes easier to take that tack, among many others, when initially challenging an 18 or 20 year old soldier than jumping right into other things. Thank you for your input, much to think about.
unrelatedwaffle:
Alas, there is no such literature, though there should be.If you want a handy example, here’s an easy one:
In the polygamous harem systems that ev-psychos keep talking about, many (even most) men will not have children. Most women *will* have children. Thus, if the goal of reproduction is reproduction, daughters are a much safer bet than sons. Furthermore, if there’s a social class component to a son’s success, high-ranking families should prefer sons, but low-ranking families should prefer daughters.
And indeed this is what biologists see in e.g. red deer (the name to google for is “Clutton-Brock”), which can influence the sex of their offspring to some extent. High-ranking deer have more sons, low-ranking deer have more daughters.
But human beings do not do this. There are *no* societies in which male infanticide is traditional, and in societies that practice female infanticide it’s generally more common among the poor than among the rich. Human behavior is the opposite of what even sloppy ev-psychos should predict — as though the goal of human reproduction is not, in fact, reproduction, but something else.
I think that “something else” is the social security of the parents. From an evolutionary POV, parents should impoverish themselves having as many kids and grandchildren as possible, and die when they’re useless to the younger generation. In practice, humans do not do this: we love our own personal lives much more than those of our descendents, even though biological evolution only cares about the latter.
I love to see what ev-spych has to say about China’s one child policy.
The mental gymnastic will be amazing.
Hmm, do you mean counter-intuitive as in way over the head of naive evo-psych hopefuls, or actually contra-biological fitness? Because, female infanticide is not necessarily the latter (evolution is cleverer than our intuition!). Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has studied both male and female infanticide from this point of view.
unrelatedwaffle: there is a HUGE anti-evo-psych literature! A terrific place to start: Susan McKinnon’s “Neo-liberal genetics: the myths and moral tales of evolutionary psychology”. Short and snappy and will have you armed with comebacks in no time!
One good, accessible anti-evo-psych book is David S Moore’s The Dependent Gene: The Fallacy of “Nature v. Nurture”. The title obviously echoes Richard Dawkins, and Moore’s argument is a multifaceted refutation of the neo-Darwinian synthesis and much of popular evo-psych methodology. He discusses, amongst other things:
(1) The notion that genes, if we even can define them, should not be considered the basic unit for natural selection. What orthodox neo-Darwnism would term “acquired characteristics” can be selected for and passed down through generations.
(2) The deeply problematic nature of drawing conclusions from twin studies and heritability studies (”useful only for the farmer and the eugenicist”, he says).
(3) The absolute necessity of tracing the developmental stages by which genes are “expressed”, the huge variety and complexity of which reveals the falsity of “genes as blueprint/recipe” and “environment as input/material used to build that which is coded for”.
He discusses a fabulous experiment which really explodes a lot of the Pinkeresque “nature versus nurture” discussion, where even those who doggedly say “obviously it’s both but but but you CAN’T DENY a genetic component”. Many (and I’ll readily admit to this) tend to fall into sloppily thinking that given sets of genes provide for a range of outcomes and that variation amongst environmental “inputs” determines which of those outcomes are produced. However, there was an experiment involving a chick embryo, in which a layer of cells adjacent to the layer of cells that ordinarily develops into a beak was replaced by mouse cells. The result? The beak cells - still chick DNA! - became mammalian teeth. That completely blows my mind - I mean, intuitively (i.e. sloppily), you would have thought there was a range of outcomes for those beak cells with chick DNA, with various beak-like characteristics (e.g. length, breadth, hardness, shape etc.) varying according to the environmental input. But the experiment shows that attempts on our part to conceptualise it this way fall flat, because there are so many environmental variations that we can’t even begin to imagine in advance, so all our notional ranges of outcomes are all going to be completely limited. Consequently, any genetic constraints we can currently imagine for ourselves are invariably “genetic-in-a-specific-set-of-environments” constraints - and people who claim to have found irreducibly fundamental features of human society and behaviour, that oh-so-conveniently coincidence with institutions fetishised by the patriarchy or conservatism, are talking out their arses. (Of course, we already knew that, but it’s nice to have an additional excuse to say it again.)
But the experiment shows that attempts on our part to conceptualise it this way fall flat, because there are so many environmental variations that we can’t even begin to imagine in advance, so all our notional ranges of outcomes are all going to be completely limited.
Um, sure, if you define developmental cues as “environmental variations”. But the cues were determined by the mouse genes in this case.
Consequently, any genetic constraints we can currently imagine for ourselves are invariably “genetic-in-a-specific-set-of-environments” constraints
This is something of a strawman. Terrestrial vertebrates are very closely related - just because avian tissue can perform as a stand-in for mammalian tissue in this case, we can’t conclude that there are no genetic constraints. As for a “specific set of environments”, outside of developmental biology labs and the island of Dr. Moreau, the lack of mammalian teeth in chickens is genetically determined. I think it would be better to use examples of actually socially plastic traits in animals and humans to argue against essentialism.
windy:
I’m a big admirer of Hrdy’s, but I don’t think she comes down strong enough on the counter-biologically-intuitive foot.
For instance, Hrdy talks about infanticide, but not about how radically human infanticide differs from that in other social animals. In other animals (e.g. baboons, lions, prairie dogs) infants are at great risk of being killed by unrelated adults. Infanticide in human societies is usually committed by parents or other close relatives, so it’s a completely different thing from the biological POV.
Hrdy has talked about how female infanticide is usually tied to the concept of a patrilineal lineage that needs to be preserved and expanded, but not about how counter-biological it is to say that the children of your daughters “don’t count” as your descendants. Genetically, this is nonsense — but it is frequently human behavior.
Yeah, right, I’ll bet it is. Up next on the reading list: Lysenko and Behe.
A more useful (that is, grounded in reality) response to evo-psych is Born Cannibal by James Miles. A sample of its themes can be found in this paper.
Not coincidentally, Miles makes one of the same critiques of Hrdy as Doctor Science just did.
No assumption necessary. It is a fact that mammals and birds are thinking, feeling beings with lives of their own.
Because animals deserve contempt or hatred, and humans do not?
windy:
Um, sure, if you define developmental cues as “environmental variations”. But the cues were determined by the mouse genes in this case.
But what does it mean for the mouse genes to “determine” cues? The entire point of Moore’s thesis is that the entire system together, in any given case, needs to be considered as an interactive complex. I imagine most people would intuitively expect that chick DNA couldn’t code for the possibility of mammalian teeth, regardless of how they were prodded by the outside world. So I think this is just a cool experiment for persuasive purposes, since most people tend to more readily accept that social behaviour is going to be less canalised-on-the-basis-of- genetic-material than is physical development. The thinking is basically, “Holy cow, if even whether I grow an arm or a tentacle out of this tissue depends so finely on what’s around it, what more whether the brain that develops from it is MAGICALLY HARDWIRED to use prostitution?!” Agreed socially plastic traits address the point more directly, but I like the dramatic effect of this illustration.
Grammar RWA:
Thanks for the link, I will check it out. I’m not sure Moore/my post warranted the mocking comparison to Behe, unless of course you know something that I don’t that makes Moore’s arguments as craptacular as all that. I’d thank you kindly to share the knowledge if you do.
I’m not sure Moore/my post warranted the mocking comparison to Behe, unless of course you know something that I don’t that makes Moore’s arguments as craptacular as all that.
I think it was the reference to the “refutation of the neo-Darwinian synthesis” that prompted the comparison. Reports of the demise of the synthesis have so far been greatly exaggerated…
Doctor Science:
No, animals have maternal infanticide as well, so I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily a “completely different thing”. And humans have had their share of the infanticide of unrelated individuals as well (if the Bible, that book of love, is any clue), and in some forms it might still exist (like the killing of fatherless children among the Ache, iirc)
G-RWA:
Wow, that text was an interesting mixture of smart and crazy.
He says:
-that evolutionary psychology does not equal gene selection. Absolutely right!
-that many critics and promoters of evolutionary psychologists don’t really have a clue about what the selfish gene or inclusive fitness theory actually implies. Absolutely right!
-that selfish gene theory implies that morality can’t evolve. BULLSHIT.
For example, he says that chimps are vicious because their selfish genes have resulted in “antisocial” behaviour, and human morality thus must be the result of culture because we have almost the same genes. But he’s quote-mining Maynard Smith somewhat - “antisocial” behaviour is not the same as immoral behaviour. For example, chimpanzee ‘warfare’ is a violent social behaviour. And what about all the kind and social behaviours chimps display? Why count the violent behaviours against chimp genes but not the nicer behaviours for them?
windy:
Maternal (or paternal) infanticide is, biologically, “completely different” from infanticide by non-relatives.
I do not know of any social mammal except humans where parental infanticide is demographically important. I do not know of any human culture where stranger infanticide is demographically important except in time of war or slavery. I also don’t know of any other mammal that uses parental infanticide to adjust the sex ratio.
I’m not really talking about sibicide, which is found in both humans and non-humans in various guises but which generally makes both evolutionary and cultural sense.
I think for most animals we don’t have the data yet to determine that. But for example, in this hyena study, 3 pups out of 100 were selectively abandoned:
Also, chimps have been suggested to selectively attack male offspring.
But the point is that maternal infanticide can in some situations make evolutionary sense too, in a species like us that demands such huge post-birth investments in offspring.
While we’re on parental infanticide, there’s evidence of sex-skewing in various large-litter mammals.
Mechanisms appear to include selective fetal resorbtion.
Paternal and maternal infanticide make perfect evolutionary sense in humans from a negative-selection point of view, but there are so many cultural factors supervening that it’s not worth thinking about that.
J, windy conveyed my intent. I do think such claims can be compared with Behe and Lysenko, however, in retrospect my tone was gratuitous and I apologize for that.
Wait… that… that would explain why he’s on my bookshelf.
Sheesh. I don’t have the confidence to categorically dismiss new ideas without at least checking the local library for the book. The paper though, as you point out, has a glaring flaw.
Good eye. I don’t know why he neglected this. The book does not make the same mistake; he covers many violent and cooperative behaviors among common chimps, bonobos, and other mammals.
Cooperation in these species is, for Miles, a product of kin selection and reciprocal altruism. That’s an uncontroversial statement for you, right? There’s your “nicer genes.”
I think “quote-mining” is much too strong an indictment. That would mean he’s making Maynard Smith say something that contradicts the overall message of JMS’s work. Here’s the quote:
“it would only be plausible to suggest that there are genetic reasons why anti-social behaviour should not increase if it were also suggested that selection had already produced an extreme degree of anti-social behaviour, and this is precisely what Wynne-Edwards denies. In fact, ‘anti-social’ mutations will occur, and any plausible model of group selection must explain why they do not spread.”
With a couple of caveats, I don’t see anything wrong with this. First, Miles does not use “immoral” to refer to nonhuman behaviors, but it’s true that many anti-social behaviors in humans are immoral, right? Second, chimp warfare is intragroup social, intergroup antisocial, right?
Okay then, I’ll quote at length from the book to try to show that the genetic factors which explain cooperation in other animals are insufficient to explain the levels of cooperation seen in humans. Typos are mine.
“Common chimps can live only in groups of up to one hundred or so individuals, and pygmy chimps tend to live in slightly smaller groups. Yet humans live side-by-side with non-kin in cities and nations of millions, group sizes unknown outside the immense kin groups of the social insects. …
Altruism in nature can, we have seen, be explained through the two main mechanisms known as reciprocal altruism and kin selection. … Mammals, being diploid, have a double set of chromosomes, one from each parent. In haplodiploid Hymenoptera females develop from fertilized eggs and have a double set of chromosomes, while males develop from unfertilized eggs and have only a single set of chromosomes to pass on (they are haploid). Sperm from a male are thus genetically identical. The coefficient of relatedness of mother to daughter has the normal value of 0.5. But the average relatedness between daughters from this male is 0.75, closer than it would be to any offspring they might conceivably have. Helping your sibling - who may number in the hundreds of thousands - can become of overriding genetic importance.
Another route very favorable to the evolution of reproductive altruism is inbreeding because relatedness can rise above the value of 0.5 that applies under outbreeding. [Discussion of termites here.] … Vast offspring production plus irreversible reproductive specialisation, morphologically delineated castes and a high level of hard-wired behavior may also enable social insects to achieve group sizes impossible within the non-human mammals.
Important to this last understanding is the naked mole-rat. … The Damaraland mole-rat is the only other eusocial mole-rat, yet colonies are tiny, with an average size of only 11 members, and a maximum size so far found of 41 members. Damaraland mole-rats have a strong inbreeding avoidance mechanism and have a relatedness coefficient of no higher than the normal 0.5 found in outbred first degree relatives. In contrast, even more extreme eusociality is displayed by the naked mole-rat, where colony average size is 80, and colonies of almost 300 animals have been discovered. Intense inbreeding among naked mole-rats has led to average intra-colony relatedness of 0.81, the highest recorded for a natural mammalian population. …
There are reasons for why social insects display their extraordinarily high degree of co-operation. There are also reasons for why naked mole-rats display their kin directed co-operative breeding. Yet these models are so very different from what occurs in Homo sapiens. … As Maynard Smith says of altruism in ‘Games, Sex and Evolution’: Biologists ‘have explanations - such as the fact that the altruist may share genes with the recipient of its altruism, and it is genes, not individuals, that matter in evolution - but they are ones that work only for altruistic behavior among the members of small groups’.
Human cohesion cannot be explained biologically. Genetically, we should not be able to live in groups any larger than those of the other apes; groups of one hundred or so individuals.”
I’ll stop there. I’m interested in your objections, so please do raise them.
i’m going to assume my comment was lost in moderation hell, and try again
Wait… that… that would explain why he’s on my bookshelf.
Sheesh. I don’t have the confidence to categorically dismiss ideas like this without at least checking the local library for the book. The paper though, as you point out, has a glaring flaw.
Good eye. I don’t know why he neglected this. The book does not make the same mistake; he covers many violent and cooperative behaviors among common chimps, bonobos, and other mammals.
Cooperation in these species is, for Miles, a product of kin selection and reciprocal altruism. That’s an uncontroversial statement for you, right? There’s your “nicer genes.”
I think “quote-mining” is much too strong an indictment. That would mean he’s making Maynard Smith say something that contradicts the overall message of JMS’s work. Here’s the quote:
“it would only be plausible to suggest that there are genetic reasons why anti-social behaviour should not increase if it were also suggested that selection had already produced an extreme degree of anti-social behaviour, and this is precisely what Wynne-Edwards denies. In fact, ‘anti-social’ mutations will occur, and any plausible model of group selection must explain why they do not spread.”
With a couple of caveats, I don’t see anything wrong with this. First, Miles does not use “immoral” to refer to nonhuman behaviors, but it’s true that many anti-social behaviors in humans are immoral, right? Second, chimp warfare is intragroup social, intergroup antisocial, right?
Okay then, I’ll quote at length from the book to try to show that the genetic factors which explain cooperation in other animals are insufficient to explain the levels of cooperation seen in humans. Typos are mine.
“Common chimps can live only in groups of up to one hundred or so individuals, and pygmy chimps tend to live in slightly smaller groups. Yet humans live side-by-side with non-kin in cities and nations of millions, group sizes unknown outside the immense kin groups of the social insects. …
Altruism in nature can, we have seen, be explained through the two main mechanisms known as reciprocal altruism and kin selection. … Mammals, being diploid, have a double set of chromosomes, one from each parent. In haplodiploid Hymenoptera females develop from fertilized eggs and have a double set of chromosomes, while males develop from unfertilized eggs and have only a single set of chromosomes to pass on (they are haploid). Sperm from a male are thus genetically identical. The coefficient of relatedness of mother to daughter has the normal value of 0.5. But the average relatedness between daughters from this male is 0.75, closer than it would be to any offspring they might conceivably have. Helping your sibling - who may number in the hundreds of thousands - can become of overriding genetic importance.
Another route very favorable to the evolution of reproductive altruism is inbreeding because relatedness can rise above the value of 0.5 that applies under outbreeding. [Discussion of termites here.] … Vast offspring production plus irreversible reproductive specialisation, morphologically delineated castes and a high level of hard-wired behavior may also enable social insects to achieve group sizes impossible within the non-human mammals.
part 3
Important to this last understanding is the naked mole-rat. … The Damaraland mole-rat is the only other eusocial mole-rat, yet colonies are tiny, with an average size of only 11 members, and a maximum size so far found of 41 members. Damaraland mole-rats have a strong inbreeding avoidance mechanism and have a relatedness coefficient of no higher than the normal 0.5 found in outbred first degree relatives. In contrast, even more extreme eusociality is displayed by the naked mole-rat, where colony average size is 80, and colonies of almost 300 animals have been discovered. Intense inbreeding among naked mole-rats has led to average intra-colony relatedness of 0.81, the highest recorded for a natural mammalian population. …
There are reasons for why social insects display their extraordinarily high degree of co-operation. There are also reasons for why naked mole-rats display their kin directed co-operative breeding. Yet these models are so very different from what occurs in Homo sapiens. … As Maynard Smith says of altruism in ‘Games, Sex and Evolution’: Biologists ‘have explanations - such as the fact that the altruist may share genes with the recipient of its altruism, and it is genes, not individuals, that matter in evolution - but they are ones that work only for altruistic behavior among the members of small groups’.
Human cohesion cannot be explained biologically. Genetically, we should not be able to live in groups any larger than those of the other apes; groups of one hundred or so individuals.”
I’ll stop there. I’m interested in your objections, so please do raise them.
guess i’ll cross my fingers and wait on part 2
ffffffffrack
OK, so is he saying something like humans have a larger group size, so they should stabilize at a higher level of “cheaters” and other antisocial mutations than chimps? That’s a less strong and more interesting claim than in the PDF. There he claims not just that “you can’t get here from there”, but that chimp genes are actively anti-large group:
Furthermore, the putative evolution of morality in the human line would have required
huge leaps in genetic design space (known as saltations) in order to remove much of
the behavioral code we shared with our common ancestor with the chimpanzees and
replace it with the antithetical coding sought (Miles, 2004).
But if we assume that morality evolved in small groups in the form of reciprocal and kin selection altruism, it could be in form of heuristic rules such as “help anyone in your group”, not “help only the 25 people that are closest to you” IMO, it should be relatively easy to extend such rules to a larger group, so I think the question should be is such morality stable, not if it can evolve.
And, in your excerpts, he doesn’t say why reciprocal altruism can’t apply to a larger group! Why couldn’t human morality evolve by increasing the proportion of reciprocal altruism as our brains grew and more complex cooperation became possible?