Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy (3 page)

We will then pick up our thread of history in the modern period and trace the tremendous strides women have made and the difference they are making as they gain influence in various walks of life. But we also have to look at the obstacles to that progress, especially in the developing world, where many of the problems with men that women in the developed world have partly overcome remain a huge burden. I will show you how advances are being made on that front and how we can accelerate this trend everywhere, transforming our species and setting the stage for its next evolutionary advance.

Finally, I will explain how the world will be different and better when women have an equal if not a dominant role in running it. This follows logically from all that has gone before; if you are convinced that men and women are fundamentally different (even if you reject the idea that women are superior), you have to believe that a pervasive rise of women even to just an equal status with men will dramatically change how the world works—improve the world, in my view—in many ways. This prediction is independent of the fact that the small numbers of women who have come to the top so far have not yet changed the world very much or even in some cases been very different from men. And we don’t have to just imagine how things will be different, because the science already predicts the major outcomes. Although boys and men may have a difficult time with the transition, in the end the new world will be better for everyone.

So of the four main parts of my argument, the idea that important aspects of the difference between men and women in identity and behavior are based in biology will offend many feminists; the idea that these differences as well as the battle between the sexes
are deeply rooted in evolution will offend the many Americans who believe (against all scientific evidence) that evolution didn’t happen; the idea that women are superior to men will offend a lot of men and some very good people of both sexes who are at present (rightly) worried about boys; and the idea that the success of women is now inevitable will offend those who think (contrary to the facts of history) that conditions for women are as bad as they’ve ever been and getting worse.

You might say that this book will have something to offend almost everyone. But it will be worth the trouble if it contributes in the least way to women attaining their rightful place after all, and if I convince a few of you that the world will be better when that happens than it has ever been in the past. It is not the end of men, but it is the end of male supremacy, and it is very nearly here.

Chapter 1

♦

Diverge, Say the Cells

O
ne of the most tragic medical stories of the nineteenth century is that of a French child called Herculine Barbin. It is difficult to write about Barbin because the personal pronoun, so ubiquitous in our language and without which we are tongue-tied—that is to say, he or she, him or her, his or hers—immediately imposes the kind of insistent classification that damaged Barbin’s life and finally ended it. We have no language with which to refer to a third sex, even though today we pride ourselves on our sensitivity to people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or transsexual.

Barbin was born in Saint-Jean-d’Angélie, then a town of around six thousand people, on November 8, 1838. The baby emerged with ambiguous genitals, and so the immediate loud cry of “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” was probably not heard. No doubt the birth attendants were at a loss for words. Even that “it” with which we precede, for a split second, the lifelong consignment of a newborn to be known as one or the other, to be confined within bars of language, culture, and psychology from cradle to grave; even the word “it”—which would be an insult at any later time—was not an option in French,
in which inanimate objects, too, must be either masculine or feminine. We don’t know what really happened on that day, but we know something about what happened later. Before committing suicide at thirty, Barbin wrote a clear, affecting memoir condemning physicians and others who, after having left well enough alone for two decades, abruptly forced a choice, ending what was until then a life in satisfactory, or at least workable, gender limbo.

Although in advanced countries the situation is changing, in general we humans have not tolerated ambiguity very well, especially when it comes to male and female. Yet not all—perhaps not most—languages have gendered personal pronouns. For example, in Turkish,
o
means either he or she and
ona
means him or her. It would be interesting to know whether a person of uncertain or intermediate gender would be fundamentally more comfortable in such a language—Persian and Tagalog, the language of the Philippines, are other examples—but clearly these cultures may have definitive, even oppressive sex roles.

Certainly nineteenth-century France had both. Barbin was at first labeled and raised as a girl, so perhaps we can begin by referring to her as such, reflecting her social reality at that time of life. Her middle name was Adélaîde, but her family called her Alexina. She attended a convent school, where she considered herself plain and where she developed a crush on an aristocratic girl. She sometimes slipped into this friend’s room at night, and she was punished for that by school authorities. As she entered puberty, she did not develop breasts or begin to menstruate; she grew some facial hair, which she tried to trim away.

Despite these difficulties, Barbin did well enough to go on to a teachers college at age seventeen, and she fell in love with one of the women teaching there. Finally, after joining the faculty at a girls’ school, she fell in love yet again, with Sara, a fellow instructor. She liked having Sara dress her, and in time they became lovers. Their liaison came to light, and at around the same time Barbin, always
sickly, developed severe pains. The doctor who examined her was not ready for what he saw and suggested that Barbin be fired, which, thanks to the liberality of this particular school, was not done.

At about age twenty-two Barbin went to confession—not new for her, since she was a good Catholic, but it was the first time she revealed how very special she was. Another doctor was asked to examine her. He found a small vagina as well as a small penis, with testicles inside her body. Sometime after that she was deemed legally male; she was forced to leave the teaching job—it was an all-girls school—and to give up Sara as well.

Barbin now became officially known as Abel and briefly made news. He—we perhaps can say that now—moved to Paris and wrote his memoir, but he was unemployed, poor, alone. He eventually sought and found death by inhaling coal gas from the stove in his apartment. Ironically, the address was on the Rue de l’École de Médecine. The memoir, set on the floor near him, was retrieved by medical personnel and lay in the International Office of Public Hygiene for a century, until the philosopher Michel Foucault discovered and published it, together with his commentary, which rightly saw Barbin’s story as a tragedy of forced gender identity.

Foucault was a normal gay man who argued, in his three-volume history of sex, that gender is culturally constructed. Many intelligent people today accept this claim. Of course it is true to a large extent, as we know from the considerable cross-cultural variety of sex roles and dramatic historical change we have seen in just the past half century. But if culture alone could explain the caprices of human sexual expression, Barbin would have been able to be a girl and young woman when that was what the culture wanted, then change into a man when the culture’s demands changed. Cultural construal—the labels we stamp on people and what we take those labels to mean—can do what it will, but cultural
construction
is something of a misnomer. What cultures do with sex is not designing
or building but a finishing process that comes along with and often behind biology. Not long ago, there was a strong belief that to be a nurse is female but to be a doctor is male; that is cultural construction with a vengeance, and cultural change has largely wiped it away. Yet when it comes to gender identity, sexual attraction, romantic feelings, aggression, and perhaps a few other aspects of our lives, cultural construction is more like choosing the cabinets than framing the house. This is a strong claim, and it is part of the purpose of this book to present the case for it.

It is fashionable to say that gender is a continuum and that, therefore, the designation of two sexes, male and female, is arbitrary. If it were arbitrary, then all cultures wouldn’t do it the same way, and they don’t. Some have a third sex or gender, or even more than three, and for some observers that closes the case. But it doesn’t, for the simple reason that all cultures have two very large categories, male and female, and a relatively small category or two for those who don’t conform. We can learn from those cultures and face up to the subtlety of gender better than we have so far. If we do, people like Barbin will have happier lives.

But the fact is that they are a small minority.

In one meaning of the word “continuum,” we can imagine a long transparent tube, closed at both ends and filled with water, in which two dyes—say, red and yellow—are introduced at the ends. The dyes will diffuse toward each other, and at some point (before the entire tube has become one shade of orange) there will be a uniform continuum in which there is true red at one end, true yellow at the other, and a gradual gradient of oranges in between. If we freeze the tube at this point, we should find equally sized bands of color—about as much middling orange as deep yellow or deep red, which will match the amount of yellow-orange and red-orange, and so on.

But suppose the tube is partly pinched in the middle. If we freeze this pinched tube after the same amount of time, we will find orange in the middle, as before, but there will be much less of it than red
or yellow. There will still be a continuum on each side, with red going toward orange as the tube narrows on one side, and yellow going toward orange on the other. This variation on either side of the bottleneck is real and important, but the continuum occurs in a small percentage of the fluid. Yet we could fairly say that the tube has a red side and a yellow side, or a reddish side and a yellowish side, while of the first tube we could only say that it has a red end and a yellow end, with equal amounts of every color in between.

If we claimed that the first tube has a yellow side and a red side, this would impose a dichotomy on a uniform continuum, and a reasonable observer would object. If we tried the same with the pinched tube, making allowance for the shades of red and yellow, and acknowledging that in and around the narrow waist of the tube there is orange fluid that should not be labeled red or yellow—or even reddish or yellowish—we would not be distorting reality, and a reasonable observer would allow us to use, carefully, the two main color words.

Some observers of the spectrum of human gender seem to believe that male and female are part of a myth, because we do indeed find everything in between. But human gender is like the narrow-waisted tube, not the uniform one. If we don’t force people to be something they are not, if we protect the rights of the small minority who don’t fit the common labels at all, as well as the larger minority who don’t fit them very well, we can be fair to everyone without denying the obvious fact that most human beings are either male or female, despite huge variation within each category.

The mainly two-part system doesn’t work well for many characteristics. If I tell you how bright, saturated, or pretty the color is, you won’t know whether I’m thinking of red or yellow. Similarly, if we play a game in which I ask you to guess whether a person I am thinking of is a man or a woman and allow you to ask a single question before guessing, you would not ask whether the person is musically gifted, or outgoing, or lives in a city. Those questions
would waste your chance. And despite the consistent sex difference in height, you would be foolish to make “How tall?” your one question; the overlap between men and women’s heights is far too great. However, if you ask, “Does the person you are thinking of have a vagina or a penis?” you would be more than 99 percent likely to guess right after getting the answer.

Of course, what we really want to know is whether certain psychological capacities, such as those for ambition, physical violence, and sexual infidelity, are more like musical ability or more like height. We already know that men and women overlap far too much in these qualities for any of them—or, for that matter, most others—to be decisive or even close to it. No behavioral question would be like the vagina-or-penis question. But the difference could still matter.

It’s very instructive to look at people who are really in the middle, and who are that way for biological reasons. Among other things, we soon find out that the middle is not really a linear continuum like the waist of the tube but is more like some exotic glass sculpture—small but beautiful and strange.

Barbin was probably what doctors call a pseudohermaphrodite, which does not imply dissembling. Biologically, true hermaphrodites have both working ovaries and working testes; that means they can make both eggs and sperm. This condition is exceedingly rare. More common, although also rare, is the condition of ambiguous genitalia, which can arise in various circumstances in people who are genetically male or female. For them, the vagina-or-penis question does not have a clear answer, or at least not a consistent one throughout life, even though the ovaries-or-testes question does. Such people have greatly helped the rest of us by allowing research that sheds light on how gender more typically develops. We have to hope they have gotten worthwhile insights into themselves in the bargain, although sometimes, in the past, research has worked against them.

At this point you may be wondering why a book about being female or male is dwelling on those who are not quite either. It’s because they are the exceptions who prove the rules. They develop as they do because of departures from one of two rather typical pathways, and the scientific analysis of those accidental detours—together with the deliberate ones in countless animal experiments—teaches us a lot about how the typical pathways work. People like Barbin—all the people who don’t fit in the two big boxes—are atypical, not abnormal. They have been called experiments in nature, and in a sense they are, provided we don’t objectify them or force them to be something they are not. These are moral obligations that precede and transcend any scientific lessons they may be so generous as to teach us.