Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy (41 page)

Current technology, as we’ve seen, has mostly replaced men’s muscular strength and is making inroads even into martial prowess; more importantly, it is creating a level playing field again in communications. Women’s coalitions now are vast webs in cyberspace—the majority of active Facebook users are women. As COO Sheryl Sandberg has said, “The world’s gone social, and women are more social than men.” The campfire is on the screen and in the social networks. Once again we are blurring the lines between our homes and our public spaces, between life, business, and politics, between a falsely diminished female and a falsely aggrandized male. Once again women’s voices really matter. With a clever combination of technology and open-minded experiment, and without pretending that men and women are the same, we can use this chance to try real equality.

According to a bad old adage in Lesotho, “A woman is the child of her father, her husband, and her son.” This sequence was long true in
Western culture, too, and was highlighted in 1869 by Elizabeth Cady Stanton as “invading . . . our homes, desecrating our family altars, dividing those whom God has joined together, exalting the son above the mother who bore him, and subjugating, everywhere, moral power to brute force.”

This is over. Women have come so far that, however far they have to go, there is no turning back. Fifty years from Stanton’s speech to the vote; fifty from that to the second wave; fifty from then till now. In another fifty, equality may not be numerically, exactly here in every realm, but it will be evident to everyone that the writing is on the wall. History is on women’s side. Even in the most oppressive places in the world, they will act as a deeply subversive force, sensitized to the changing lives of other women throughout the world, undermining backwardness and oppression in their own.

Anthropologist Helen Fisher, in her book
The First Sex,
was similarly optimistic: “Like a glacier, contemporary women are slowly carving a new economic and social landscape, building a new world. . . . We are inching toward a truly collaborative society, a global culture in which the merits of both sexes are understood, valued, and employed.” I agree, except that only the relentlessness will be glacial; the pace will not. It will be like the rise in life expectancy, the decline of family size, the spread of democracy—a matter of decades or, at most, generations. Having known five generations in my own limited life, I don’t see this as a long time. In the light of evolution, archaeology, and history, it’s no time at all.

My grandparents lived nearly the entire span from the beginning of the suffragist movement until the 1950s. We don’t think of that decade as a good time for women, and in many ways it wasn’t, but by then it had become routine for women to vote, work, go to college, and drive, none of which was true when my grandparents met and married. I’ve seen for myself all the transformations from the 1950s until now. My grandson (I don’t have a granddaughter yet) will see at least as much change as I did—his father is a superb model—and
when he is my age, women will have gained enormously in rights, equality, and power.

They will not make a perfect world, but it will be less flawed than the one men have made and ruled these thousands of years. They will build on men’s achievements and mend some wounds in the legacy—not because they are earth mothers but because they are earth citizens, with a strongly pragmatic bent and a balance of healing and damage that is, in their very marrow, different from that of males.

My grandson, I think, will be happy in the new world. It will be better for him
because
women help run it. All indications are that as leaders they will be fair to him. But during the transition, some men will feel pain and some boys will need protecting; they may be angry, as they have often been in the past. They will need sympathy, patience, education, leadership, and wisdom to bring them along, and to ensure that they do not resent the successes of their mothers, sisters, lovers, wives, friends, and daughters. But, however tumultuous, this transition will in the end make a better world for everyone. In anthropological or even historical terms, it will not take much longer: half a century, a century at most—nothing, really, when you consider the depth of the past.

We have barely begun to see what women can do. We will not see the end of men—they, too, have a contribution to make—but we will see the end of male supremacy. It will be a great beginning for women and a new start for men, too. Women are smart, determined, steady, fair, calm, strong, optimistic, capable, democratic, cooperative, and unstoppable. They are attentive to their own flaws and grateful for the strengths and contributions of others, men included. Their future history is an open book before them; the empty pages beckon with impatience, expectation, and even a hint of seduction, and women will fill those pages with splendid untold stories.

Acknowledgments

Sex differences being a subject that interests everyone, and on which every life supplies endless information, it will come as no surprise that what I know about it rests on the shoulders of countless people—parents, teachers, friends, relatives, lovers, children, students, colleagues, and even strangers. Add to this the fact that it has been one of my academic interests for a lifetime, and you can imagine a list of thank-yous that goes on for many pages. My gratitude extends far beyond the few people I can mention here.

First and foremost, I thank
some
of the women who not only were role models and helped me believe in myself, but who also made it clear to me that women can do anything:

–Hannah Levin Konner, Dora Venit, Jean Silbersweig, Jane Chermayeff, Beatrice Whiting, Ronnie Wenker Konner, Nancy Howell, Elaine Markson, Kathy Mote, Joanna Adams, Betty Castellani, Deborah Lipstadt, Shlomit Finkelstein, Sherry Turkle, Melissa Fay Greene, Mari Fitzduff, Zoë Heller, Patricia Greenfield, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Polly Wiessner, Megan Biesele, Sally Gouzoules, and Carol Worthman;

–my late wife Marjorie Shostak, friend of my youth, adventurous partner in fieldwork and in life, African traveler, author of the anthropological classic
Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman
, illuminator of women’s roles cross-culturally, passionate mother of my
children, unfailing supporter of my plans and dreams, and brave fighter against cancer;

–my wife and friend of many years now, Ann Cale Kruger, a dedicated and brilliant child psychologist who has taught me so much about how the environment molds us, brought the arts to disadvantaged children, worked to save girls from sexual exploitation, shaped generations of students, teachers, and counselors, and made a home for our two families in harmony;

–the many other women I have had as colleagues and friends who taught me lessons large and small;

–the women of the !Kung hunter-gatherers among whom Marjorie and I lived for two years, who showed extraordinary bravery, skill and judgment in the challenges of an intensely difficult life, while tolerating our questions and intrusions;

–and the women who admitted an anxious medical student into their illnesses, healing processes, childbirths, motherhood, pain, suffering, joy, and, when possible, to the thrill and triumph of recovery.

I also thank the men who along the way have helped make me a better man, teaching me that loving women includes admiring them, and who helped me suppress any slightest tendency I might have had to think or feel that my own success depended on treating women as anything less than equal: Irving Konner, Herbert Perluck, Lawrence Konner, Martin Silbersweig, Irven DeVore, Gerald Henderson, Stefan Stein, John Whiting, David Silbersweig, Joe Beck, Julian Gomez, Boyd Eaton, Steve Berman, Charles McNair, Misha Pless, Leslie Rubin, and Joe Weber.

I thank the countless teachers, in addition to some mentioned above, who helped me understand the processes of evolution, development, and brain function, especially as applied to understanding sex differences: Jerome Kagan, Ernst Mayr, Nicholas Blurton Jones, Richard Lee, Patricia Draper, Jane Lancaster, Patricia Whitten, Alice Rossi, Daniel Federman, Norman Geschwind, Robert Sapolsky, James Rilling, and Jared Diamond, among many others.

I gratefully acknowledge my debt to my literary agent of more than three decades, Elaine Markson, who represented and supported my work with professionalism, loyalty, and humor, and to her associates Geri Thoma, Gary Johnson, and most recently Chaya Levin. My own assistant Kathy Mote, who has been with me and my family for twenty-seven years, provided invaluable help in this as in so many other projects.

At W. W. Norton & Company, John Glusman acquired the manuscript and gave it two careful readings at different stages, improving it greatly. He also asked others at the company to read it, and their comments were extremely helpful, as was the work of John’s assistant Jonathan Baker, of the superbly careful and widely knowledgeable copy editor Bonnie Thompson, and of the publicists Rachel Salzman and Lauren Opper. My experience justified the claim on Norton’s website that because it is exclusively owned by them, “Norton’s employees answer to each other, not to outside shareholders or directors. With a shared commitment to the company at heart, they publish only what they love to publish.” It was my good fortune to come under that umbrella.

Outside of Norton, the manuscript was read in full by Faith Levy and in part by Anna Beck, Brian Diaz, Ann Cale Kruger, Jennifer Kuzara, Michael Peletz, and Julie Seaman; all made valuable comments. Tami Blumenfield and John Townsend answered important questions. Sarah Hrdy and Sherry Turkle made helpful suggestions in addition to providing pre-publication praise. I am grateful to all these friends and colleagues for their time, effort, and expertise.

Finally, I thank my children, Susanna Konner Post, Adam Konner, Sarah Konner, stepdaughter Logan Kruger, and “extra daughter” Becky Perry, for allowing me into their lives and even more for keeping me in, really in, their lives when they began to have a choice; and my grandson Ethan, not yet three but full of developmental lessons. These young people have taught me more
about how we become women and men, and more importantly how we become human, than I can ever thank them enough for.

To them, and to Irven DeVore, my lifelong teacher and friend who died on September 23, 2014, and whose insights into the nature of sex differences
and
similarities pervade this book, it is gratefully dedicated. Only I, alas, am accountable for the much that must be wrong with it. For indulging my flawed attempt to shed light on matters that Darwin aptly called “hidden in darkness,” I also thank you, the reader, and hope that, despite my stumbles and my dim, flickering lamp, it has been a partly illuminating journey.

Notes

Introduction: “Stronger Than All Besides”

vii
Elizabeth Cady Stanton speech:
“Address to the National Woman Suffrage Convention, Washington, D.C., January 19, 1869,” in
The Concise History of Woman Suffrage: Selections from History of Woman Suffrage
, ed. Paul Buhle and Mari Jo Buhle (Champaign-Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 249–56.

7
“The problem of woman”:
Simone de Beauvoir,
The Second Sex
(1949; repr., New York: Vintage, 2011).

9
water striders:
L. Rowe, G. Arnqvist, J. Krupa, and A. Sih, “Sexual Conflict and the Evolutionary Ecology of Mating Patterns: Water Striders as a Model System,”
Trends in Ecology and Evolution
9 (August 8, 1994): 289–93. Video of water striders mating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URjVA2CUgSo, accessed Sept. 12, 2014.

11
“Male bonding and patriarchy”:
Camille Paglia,
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 12.

Chapter 1: Diverge, Say the Cells

19
Herculine Barbin:
Michel Foucault and Herculine Barbin,
Herculine Barbin: Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite
(New York: Pantheon, 1980).

22
a third sex or gender:
For an excellent broad overview of how people who are not clearly and simply male or female have been treated,
see Gilbert Herdt, ed.,
Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History
(New York: Zone Books, 1994).

25
Here is the story of sexual development:
For a marvelous first-person account of this process, see Joan Roughgarden’s
Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), chapter 10.

27
Barbin’s modern counterparts:
For a readable and fairly recent overview, see Melissa Hines’s
Brain Gender
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). For a scientific update, see her article “Gender Development and the Human Brain,”
Annual Review of Neuroscience
34 (2011): 69–88. For collections of authoritative reviews, see Jill B. Becker, Karen J. Berkley, Nori Geary, Elizabeth Hampson, James P. Herman, and Elizabeth A. Young, eds.,
Sex Differences in the Brain: From Genes to Behavior
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), and the group of papers introduced by Simon LeVay in
Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology
32 (2011): 110–263. Specific studies are cited below.

29
Not everyone interprets these facts in the same way:
For a recent critique, see Rebecca M. Jordan-Young,
Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

29
In one classic study:
C. H. Phoenix, J. A. Resko, and R. W. Goy, “Psychosexual Differentiation as a Function of Androgenic Stimulation,” in
Perspectives in Reproduction and Sexual Behavior,
ed. M. Diamond (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 33–49; R. W. Goy, “Experimental Control of Psychosexuality,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B
259 (1970): 149–62.