Then he's a moron too and I don't need to read him. Any sort of gender essentialisms is patriarchal dogma that flies in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Where do the onna musha female samurai fit into this narrative? Or the shield maidens of the Vikings? Or the Mosuo of China, where the women are the head of the household and do all the farming and heavy work and men have no formal relationship with their children? Where do the Aka fit in, where fathers spend as much time caring for and holding children as mothers? How about the emerging data on just how many ancient women were big game hunters? What about the Night Witches, the all female corp of young women who signed up to have abbreviated training as pilots so they could bomb and harass Nazis in WWII — flying wood and canvas bi-planes with no navigation instruments or closed cockpits, no parachutes, or even uniforms and boots that fit.
You've also had access to three pieces about the flaws in Buss's methodology and two of them about what's wrong with EP in general. It's not just that I disagree with his conclusions - he's completely disregarded the scientific method to simply decide that correlation equals causation with no proof whatsoever about what else happened in the middle. 🙄
There are no hard and fast "sex differences" that aren't related to sexual reproduction or nursing - in humans and actually in all other animals. There are trends but they are often cultural (even animals have differing cultures), or differ at different periods of historical time, and are highly contingent on a host of other factors.
But also, within some species—including our own, as this chapter fleshes out some more—neither sex has the monopoly on characteristics like competitiveness, promiscuity, choosiness, and parental care. The particular pattern, as we saw, depends on the animal’s ecological, material, and social situation. This suggests that, even within a particular species, the effect of the genetic and hormonal facets of sex on brain and behavior must not inflexibly inscribe or “hardwire” particular behavioral profiles or predispositions into the brain; not even those more common in one sex than the other. Instead, they are drawn out to a greater or lesser degree, as circumstances dictate.
Fine, Cordelia. Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society (p. 87). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
Cultural influences are nearly everything about how a society looks and operates. Change those, and you’ve got an entirely different set of circumstances. Before 4 BC, Egyptian women used to go into the marketplace to conduct business, including legal business, while the men stayed home and did the weaving.
Alter conditions within a subculture, as in the story I linked you about sex-positive/clothing optional spaces, and again, even men raised within the norms of this culture can readily change them when there is both incentive and pressure to do so.
We have the culture that we tolerate and we have the norms that we dictate and indoctrinate children into.
And although much of this societal messaging is that males are more competent, independent, and worthy of holding power, strict gender norms hurt boys and men as well. The Global Early Adolescent Study, based at Johns Hopkins University, concludes that due to these gender norms, “they engage in and are the victims of physical violence to a much greater extent than girls; they die more frequently from unintentional injuries, are more prone to substance abuse and suicide; and as adults their life expectancy is shorter than that of women.
Such differences are socially not biologically determined.”
At least that’s what those dummies at Johns Hopkins seem to think.
