Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy by Melvin Konner
Authors: Melvin Konner
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in your favor. Take a shot. Now you probably have a hundred dollars.
I pick a third person and tell you that when they have sex, they greatly prefer or insist that it be with a man. This time, you are actually taking a significant risk—say, 5 percent or so. But with a 95 percent chance of guessing right, what will you do?
You are starting to like this game. The fourth random person, I inform you, has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. The fifth has been arrested three times for assault. The sixth, heterosexual, has been physically abused by a romantic partner. The seventh is often depressed and has attempted suicide four times without success. The eighth pays regularly for commercial sex. The ninth has never masturbated to orgasm. The tenth likes games or sports that involve violence.
Now, not a single one of these bets is a sure thing. But the game is going on and on, and you would be an utter fool not to guess on every question I have asked so far, since you are very likely to get them right. The people numbered four through ten are overwhelmingly likely to be male, male, female, female, male, female, and male.In the long run, with these odds, even though you will not win every time, you are going to be a very happy gamer.
Of course, I could tell you other facts. I could say the person speaks Mandarin, or is shy, or likes watching television, or is overweight, or has a pet, or is married. You could guess if you like, and probably in the long run you’d break even with these sorts of questions, but you might as well pass and wait for a fact that statistically, to a very large extent, throughout the world, distinguishes women from men . Such facts can meet that standard only because culture does not easily contravene them; they arise in large part from genetic differences between the sexes and unfold through hormonal influences on the brain, beginning before birth.
Consider the power of culture in its natural domain. If a visitor to a foreign land points to what we call a dog and looks quizzical, a helpful native might say chien, perro, hund, kalb, kelev, gou, kutta, or any one of thousands of other words that mean the same thing and are arbitrarily arrived at through cultural tradition. The possibilities are infinite, and if the world went on long enough, the variations would be infinite, too.
But if the same visitor asks a knowledgeable person, “By the way, are the homicides in your country committed mainly by women?” there are only three likely answers: yes, no, and about the same as men. If culture determined the answer and men and women were not fundamentally different in physical violence, you would expect experts in a lot of the countries to say “about the same” and for the remainder of people to be about equally divided between “yes” and “no.” But the fact is that you will never, ever, anywhere get an answer to that question other than “no.” Of course, it may be elaborated upon, as in: No, you idiot. What kind of question is that? Men overwhelmingly commit the violent crimes everywhere. This is one of the few rock-solid truths of criminology. And so on.
In fact, in the game we played before, I could pick a name at random from a list of all the adults in a given country, then pick from adifferent country each successive time. If we travel the world, visiting every country, and you play the same way, with that same list of questions, you will occasionally give back fifty dollars, but in the end you will be rich.
There is nothing in human behavior that isn’t variable. Some women are very violent and kill other women or men, although some of the men they kill attack or threaten them first. Women evolved to defend their young, and some of the violence done by women or any female mammal serves this vital goal. Paradoxically, women do most of the killing of infants and children in home settings, but that is because they are the ones who are with them, and such acts are much more likely
I pick a third person and tell you that when they have sex, they greatly prefer or insist that it be with a man. This time, you are actually taking a significant risk—say, 5 percent or so. But with a 95 percent chance of guessing right, what will you do?
You are starting to like this game. The fourth random person, I inform you, has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. The fifth has been arrested three times for assault. The sixth, heterosexual, has been physically abused by a romantic partner. The seventh is often depressed and has attempted suicide four times without success. The eighth pays regularly for commercial sex. The ninth has never masturbated to orgasm. The tenth likes games or sports that involve violence.
Now, not a single one of these bets is a sure thing. But the game is going on and on, and you would be an utter fool not to guess on every question I have asked so far, since you are very likely to get them right. The people numbered four through ten are overwhelmingly likely to be male, male, female, female, male, female, and male.In the long run, with these odds, even though you will not win every time, you are going to be a very happy gamer.
Of course, I could tell you other facts. I could say the person speaks Mandarin, or is shy, or likes watching television, or is overweight, or has a pet, or is married. You could guess if you like, and probably in the long run you’d break even with these sorts of questions, but you might as well pass and wait for a fact that statistically, to a very large extent, throughout the world, distinguishes women from men . Such facts can meet that standard only because culture does not easily contravene them; they arise in large part from genetic differences between the sexes and unfold through hormonal influences on the brain, beginning before birth.
Consider the power of culture in its natural domain. If a visitor to a foreign land points to what we call a dog and looks quizzical, a helpful native might say chien, perro, hund, kalb, kelev, gou, kutta, or any one of thousands of other words that mean the same thing and are arbitrarily arrived at through cultural tradition. The possibilities are infinite, and if the world went on long enough, the variations would be infinite, too.
But if the same visitor asks a knowledgeable person, “By the way, are the homicides in your country committed mainly by women?” there are only three likely answers: yes, no, and about the same as men. If culture determined the answer and men and women were not fundamentally different in physical violence, you would expect experts in a lot of the countries to say “about the same” and for the remainder of people to be about equally divided between “yes” and “no.” But the fact is that you will never, ever, anywhere get an answer to that question other than “no.” Of course, it may be elaborated upon, as in: No, you idiot. What kind of question is that? Men overwhelmingly commit the violent crimes everywhere. This is one of the few rock-solid truths of criminology. And so on.
In fact, in the game we played before, I could pick a name at random from a list of all the adults in a given country, then pick from adifferent country each successive time. If we travel the world, visiting every country, and you play the same way, with that same list of questions, you will occasionally give back fifty dollars, but in the end you will be rich.
There is nothing in human behavior that isn’t variable. Some women are very violent and kill other women or men, although some of the men they kill attack or threaten them first. Women evolved to defend their young, and some of the violence done by women or any female mammal serves this vital goal. Paradoxically, women do most of the killing of infants and children in home settings, but that is because they are the ones who are with them, and such acts are much more likely
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