The Natural Superiority of Women (21 page)

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Authors: Ashley Montagu

Tags: #Social Science, #Anthropology, #Cultural, #Women's Studies, #test

BOOK: The Natural Superiority of Women
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Emphasis on chastity has, in effect, produced in most persons brought up on the tradition of the Western world a calculated ignorance of the facts of human growth and development. As a result, there has been a conspicuous failure to prepare for the rights, duties, and privileges of becoming a spouse and parent. The amount of damage and tragic suffering this devastating ignorance has produced is incalculable. It is not being suggested that premarital intercourse as such is a desirable thing. It is being suggested that one of the byproducts of the early and continued emphasis on premarital chastity has been the production of a deplorably damaging ignorance of the so-called facts of life, of human creation, growth, and development. Such ignorance is harmful to the healthy development of the individual and therefore to the healthy development of society.

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4
Who Said, "The Inferior Sex"?
The myth of female inferiority is so old, and has been for so long a part of the ideas and institutions of civilized men, that it has been generalized for almost every aspect of the female being. Is there a trait in which women have not been considered inferior to men? It would be difficult to think of one. The idea seems to be that where women are different from men, they are inferior to men. In societies in which women have been allowed certain exclusive privileges, such privileges have not necessarily rendered them, in those or any other respects, superior to men, only different, with certain rights and privileges of their own. The myth of female inferiority has been extended not only to mental functions but also to physical traits. The lesser muscular power of the female has lent the strongest and most obvious kind of support to this belief. The female, it has been "clear," is weaker than the male. That is all men have known about the facts, which is all, they have felt, they needed to know. The facts, after all, speak for themselves. What countless errors and unspeakable crimes have been committed in the name of the authority carried by such words as, "The facts, after all, are obvious." But what is a fact? And what does "obvious'' mean?

 

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For most people a fact has always been something they could perceive, a thing they could grasp; but what most people have not understood is that a fact for them has been an experience they have endowed with a certain meaning. An experience is anything lived or undergone; a meaning is an interpretation, adding significance to the experience undergone.
Homo additus naturae .
And what men will add to each experience depends upon the kingdom that is within them.
The kingdom that is within us is socially constructed,

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and what we perceive we preconceive in terms of that social construct, in the sense that every new experience is evaluated in terms of an already existing mass of perceptions within the mind; the psychologist calls this process "apperception." Men have lived upon the earth for several million years, and for a long period of this secular time they knew it to be a "fact" that the earth was flat. After all, it was "obvious." For quite as long a time it was obvious that the earth was a stationary body and that it was the sun that "rose" and ''set." For untold thousands of years it was believed that decaying matter generated insects. Most of us today would accept the same mistakes as facts were it not that it has now become part of our tradition to think otherwise.
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Most of us have no more proved for ourselves the facts about the solar system and the generation of insects than we have proved the facts we accept and to which we subscribe concerning female inferiority.

Men are roughly about 10 percent bigger than women. The female is generally shorter, slighter, and less muscular than the male; these facts are obvious to everyone. The male, it is asserted, is clearly superior in these respects to the female. Let us here recall our definition of superiority in terms of the conferral of survival benefits upon those possessing the particular traits under discussion. Do the greater size and muscular power of the male, from the biological standpoint, confer greater survival benefits upon him? We have already answered that question in the negative in the previous chapter, but let us for a moment continue with question and answer from another point of view: Do lesser size and muscular power of the female confer lesser survival benefits upon her? The answer, on the basis of the facts, is a resounding
no!
On the contrary, the facts prove that the biological advantages are with the female. Insofar as sheer

 

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muscular efficiency and endurance are concerned, the performance of the shorter, slighter, "weaker" female as a cross-Channel swimmer, for example, suggests that the best women can do as well as the best men, and often even better. Ever since Gertrude Ederle of the United States, on August 6, 1926, swam the English Channel in fourteen hours, thirty-one minutes-two hours faster than any man or woman had ever done before-there have been striking performances by women that testify to their remarkable physical skill and staying power. On October 12, 1955, Florence Chadwick of the United States crossed the Channel from England to France, the more difficult route, in thirteen hours, thirtythree minutes. Abla Adel Khairi of Egypt, aged thirteen years and ten months, on August 17, 1974, made the same crossing in twelve hours, twenty-two minutes. The race from France to England in August 1957, in which both men and women competed, was won by a woman swimmer, Greta Anderson of Denmark, in thirteen hours and fifty-three minutes. In September 1967, Linda McGill, a twenty-one-year-old Australian, broke the women's record by swimming the Channel in nine hours, thirty-nine minutes, missing the men's mark by only twenty-four minutes. In September 1971, Connie Ebbelaar, a twenty-two-year-old Dutch swimming instructor, swam the Channel from England to France in ten hours, forty minutes, which was just twenty minutes away from equaling the men's record for the twenty-one-mile swim. Wendy Brook of the United States, in September 1976, swam the Channel from France to England in eight hours and fifty-six minutes, the fastest time by anyone, male or female. Even more astonishing is the performance of Peggy Lee Dean of the United States who, in July 1978, set a record for the fastest Channel crossing from France to England in seven hours and forty minutes. Finally, without adding any of the other Channel records achieved by women, there stand the unique accomplishments of Diana Nyad of the United States who, in 1975, became the first person to swim nonstop the thirty-two miles across Lake Ontario; this she did in twenty hours. That same year she broke the 1927 record for a swim around Manhattan Island, completing the circuit in seven hours, fifty-seven minutes. A dedicated marathon swimmer Nyad has swum in shark cages on all the challenging waterways of the world, and in August 1979 was the first person to make the

 

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sixty-mile swim against sharks, jellyfish, and the cruel Gulf Stream current from the Bahamas to Florida. She was in the water for twenty-seven hours and thirty-eight minutes. Not only had she done "the impossible," but she followed this by completing a sixty-seven mile swim in the North Sea, followed by other longdistance swims, some of them setting world records.

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Among many of women's physical advantages is a greater distribution of body fat than men: 25 percent of body weight is fat in females compared with 14 percent in males. The overall subcutaneous fatty layer of women renders them more buoyant and better insulated against cold than men. Women's narrower shoulders offer less resistance through the water. Women are also capable of calling on extra reserves of energy unavailable to men. In longdistance running, for example, while they may tire, few women "hit the wall," as the expression has it for the sudden pain and debilitating weakness that sometimes hits longdistance runners or swimmers. This difference may be due to the fact that when the glycogen, the main source of carbohydrates that power the muscles, is exhausted in men, women are able to draw upon their fat reserves.
Women are able to deal with heat better than men. Their body temperatures can rise two or three degrees above men's before they begin to sweat, and then they do so more efficiently than men, because women's greater number of sweat glands are distributed more uniformly over their bodies. Also, blood supply to the skin is more efficient, so more blood is distributed to the surface to be cooled. The male sweats sooner, but the female sweats physiologically more efficiently.
Women are also better equipped to deal with cold. Another sporting event in which women have excelled, but few have thus far entered, is the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. This race is run under the some of the world's worst weather conditions on the more than eleven-hundred-mile Alaska trail from Anchorage to Nome. The first women to win with her dog team was Libby Riddles in 1985. In March 1990, Susan Butcher won her fourth consecutive Iditarod in record time. The race presents a grueling challenge requiring great stamina and strength of character. In addition to driving the sled, and attending to their own needs, participants must prepare meals for their dogs and care for their injuries, often with little or no sleep.

 

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In a society in which, in the last resort, its institutions are maintained by force, physical power becomes a valued social factor; but this is a very different thing from claiming that it is either a valuable biological or indispensable social trait. Civilized societies in particular have been characterized by a great deal of both covert and overt hostility. The quantity of violence that characterizes our contemporary civilized socially dysfunctional societies presents a picture of a world at war with itself. The most widely read books of our day deal with death, disaster, and crimes of violence; theater and the motion pictures carry on the tradition, and television proffers, as the most staple article of diet for our children, murder, muck, mystery, and every form of violence. War or the threat of war is almost continuously with us, and whole generations have been educated to believe that war and conflict are natural concomitants of human living. Thrilling and dangerous spectacles draw large and devoted audiences. Slugging matches, miscalled boxing, and no-holds-barred wrestling matches draw the largest followingsand now that television has brought these spectacles into the home, the education in violence proceeds apace. In a land as civilized as the United States, the most common known reason leading to a homicide was an argument, representing 28 percent of all homicides, only slightly smaller than the percentage resulting from robberies. Males, it was shown for 1995, have a firearm fatality rate six times that of females (24 per 100,000 vs. 4 per 100,000 for women). The average firearm fatality rate itself is alarmingly high, nearly 14 firearm fatalies per hundred thousand persons. In 1995 alone, 35,987 persons died as a result of firearm injuries18,503 from suicide, 15,835 from homicide 1,225 were from unintentional shootings, and 394 from undetermined causes. The United States Department of Justice reports that men are more likely to be the killers and the victims, they are more then nine times more likely than women to commit murder. Even more alarmingly, firearm homicides by young people, mostly male, aged 18-24 increased from about 5,000 in 1980 to more than 7,500 in 1997.
Though in our time we have increased the facilities for the wider education of humankind in the varieties of violence, violence in one form or another has characterized most civilized societies for a very long time. Where violence has been traditionally resorted to as a means of settling disputes, familial,

 

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group, tribal, and intertribal physical force becomes not only a valued trait but also a sanctioned form of behavior. For example, it is permissible to beat one's wife and one's children in many societies without in any way being penalized for doing so. Boys traditionally fight; girls do not. It should be clear that in societies that sanction a certain amount of violent behavior, men, owing to their greater muscular power, consider themselves superior to women in this respect, and women readily grant them this superiority. But it must be understood that such superiority is a socially conferred superiority, not a biological one, because the male's greater muscular power enables him by force to obtain and maintain certain immediate social advantages. If the adequate functioning and survival of the male depended upon violent conflict with the female, then there would be no question concerning the biological superiority of the male's greater muscular power; but the efficient functioning and survival of the male does not depend upon violent conflict with anyone. The greater muscular power of the male has, to a large extent, been an economically valuable trait, especially during the long period of history when so much of the labor expended in human societies was in the form of muscle power. Today, when machines do more than 90 percent of the work formerly done by muscle, muscular power has become an outmoded redundancy borne by men at a price that exceeds any return it can yield either to them or to society.
Let us apply another test. What is the answer to the question: Which sex survives the rigors of life, whether normal or extreme, better than the other? The answer is: the female sex. Women endure all sorts of devitalizing conditions better than men: starvation, exposure, fatigue, shock, illness, and the like. This immediately raises the question of the alleged weakness of the female. Is not the female supposed to be the weaker vessel? Weakness is a misleading word that has, in this connection, confused people. Feminine weakness has generally meant that the female is more fragile and less strong than the male. But the fact is that the female is constitutionally stronger than the male and muscularly less powerful; she has greater stamina and lives longer. Women who reach 100 years or more in age are much more numerous than men who do. Muscular strength should not be confused with constitutional strength,

 

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