ACT I
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People always use their abilities and ideas in their environments to pursue whatever they value in life. They think of more ideas in the process.
I’ve been talking a lot about race in this series because it’s the best example of what happens when different groups of people have the same basic abilities but different environments. They get different results.
Now let’s turn that around. What happens when two groups of people have the
same basic environment but their abilities are very different? And what’s the best example we have of that?
What’s the biggest difference between men and women? If you need some help you can find lots of pictures of naked men to look at online. And a lot of pictures of naked women.
It’s our reproduction organs.
Now think about how evolution works. Survival and reproduction are our two basic instincts.
Since we have two different sets of reproductive organs, that means we’ve evolved different reproductive instincts for using them.
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What’s the best way to reproduce?
The simplest way to reproduce is for single celled organisms to split in two. Then both of the new cells have the same genes as the original cell. Organisms that reproduce that way can produce a new generation every few days.
That doesn’t work for multicellular life forms.
It takes a lot more than a few days for us to have a new generation of children. If our children had the same genes as we do, viruses and bacteria, which are single celled organisms, would evolve much faster than we do, overcome our immune systems, and kill us all pretty quickly.
Sexual reproduction means we split our cells in two, where each new cell gets half of the genes. Then we combine the reproductive cells from two individuals to create the first cell of an offspring. That offspring has a combination of genes that’s never happened before.
The simplest way to do that would be for adults to divide cells exactly in half, and then mix their cells together so they could combine with each other. Some species of fungus reproduce that way. There aren’t different genders in a species like that. The reproductive cells from any adult can combine with the reproductive cells from any other adult.
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What would happen if an adult didn’t split its reproductive cells exactly in half? What if an adult got a variation in a gene that made it split its reproductive cells differently? What if it split its genes 50/50 between the two new cells, but it split the nutrients in the cells 60/40?
The cell with 60% of the nutrients would be heavier and less mobile than a cell with 50% of the nutrients. The cells with 40% of the nutrients would be lighter and more mobile. The cells with 60% nutrients would have a better chance of surviving if they were fertilized. The cells with 40% nutrients would have less of a chance.
But the numbers involved here don’t all change at consistent rates. The survival rates of the new cells are affected by their environments.
If the increase in survival rates of the 60% nutrient cells was greater than the reduction in survival rates for the 40% nutrient cells, the individual that does that gets a higher survival rate for its genes. And you know what higher survival rates for genes means. Evolution.
If a new variation makes cells split 70/30 and the bigger cells keep increasing their survival rates more than the smaller cells lower their survival rates, the evolution continues. Then it’s 80/20, then 90/10.
Eventually you end up with adults that split their cells by putting half the genes and no nutrients in one cell that isn’t supposed to do anything anymore, and it breaks down right away. The other cell gets half the genes and all of the nutrients.
That’s what an egg cell is.
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When some members of the species began evolving bigger, less mobile reproductive cells, it created an opportunity for others to evolve smaller, more mobile reproductive cells.
If another adult got a variation in a gene that made it split the nutrients in its reproductive cells 40/40 and it repurposed the other 20% of the nutrients to give the outsides of the cells something that would help them move faster and further, and that made those cells combine with other cells to create offspring more often, that would raise the survival rate of the genes that made that happen. So that would evolve.
Then it’s 30/30 and it uses 40% of the nutrients to add to the outside of the cells. Then it’s 20/20/60, then 10/10/80.
Eventually it’s something like 1/1/98, where the reproductive cell gets just enough nutrients to keep it alive a day or two, but it gets a tail that makes it really good at swimming.
That’s what a sperm cell is.
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I’m not just talking about people. Or even animals.
If you get seasonal allergies from pollen, this is what all the pollen is for. Really, when your seasonal allergies act up, it’s because the trees around you are having an orgy, and a lot of the sperm cells are going into your nose, which makes you sneeze.
What about the rest of our reproductive organs?
If you produce big reproductive cells that don’t travel very well, what’s the best way to use them? If they don’t travel well, they don’t go very far from you. So if they get combined with another cell, you have a lot of opportunities to increase their survival rates. You can carry them, protect them, and provide for them.
That’s what uteruses do.
(Remember, I’m talking about biology right now. We’re working our way up to talking about politics, but we’re not there yet.)
If you produce the highly mobile kind of reproductive cells, what you need most is a delivery system.
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How much of a difference in physical commitment to having each child are we talking about?
If a woman gets pregnant every year from the time she reaches puberty until she reaches menopause, how many times could she get pregnant? 30? If she only has one kid at a time and they all live, that’s 30 children.
If a man got as many women pregnant as he could from the time he reached puberty to the time he just couldn’t anymore, how many pregnancies would that be?
That could be one per day for about 50 years. If these women had one child per pregnancy and all of them lived, that’s 18,000 children.
Now what does this tell us about our reproductive instincts?
Let’s go right down the list of motivations. We’re talking about two very different interpretations of our most primal feelings, so there’s no way to put all of our feelings about it into words right here. This is just the beginning of an ongoing conversation.
ACT II
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“When I think about survival, the first things that come to mind are…”
Survival as a motivation is affected by our reproduction instincts because we all have to survive long enough to reproduce. But that means different things for men and women.
The biggest difference is that in order to reproduce, men have to survive long enough to have sex at least once. Women, on the other hand, have to survive long enough to have sex at least once, and then have to survive for at least nine more months. That difference of nine months can mean a lot.
Humans diverged from the chimpanzees about 7,000,000 years ago. That means about 350,000 generations ago. A lot of different things have happened in 350,000 generations, and through it all, all of our ancestors survived and had children. They weren’t pushed to desperation all that time. But they didn’t have American middle class lifestyles all that time either.
Where do we see that play out today?
Look at the average lifespans of people in any demographic. Then look at the average lifespans of men and women within that demographic. Women’s average lifespans are always longer than men’s.
A lot of people have debated whether or not men are smarter than women. Well women obviously know more than men do about staying alive. And that’s one of the most important things in life for people to know about.
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“When I think about safety, the first things that come to mind are…”
Each individual child is more of a physical commitment for a woman than it is for a man. You hear of women dying during child birth, but you never hear of men dying during childbirth.
Reproduction organs make up more of women’s bodies than men’s. That means when women get injured, there’s a greater chance of their reproduction organs getting injured. Their ability to reproduce depends more on their physical safety. So men and women think differently about our safety.
Why do you think most physically dangerous jobs are dominated by men?
When women work in male dominated fields, a lot of people try to discourage them. But if everyone in America could work in any job they wanted starting tomorrow, do you think 50% of loggers, construction workers, police, firefighters, and military combat personnel would suddenly be women? Or would most women still not want those jobs?
Women also think much more than men do about safety from men. Men have more upper body strength and are more physically aggressive than women, so women think ahead a lot more to keep themselves safe from that.
There’s also sexual assault. That’s such an important topic that I’ll save that for its own episode. For now the point is that women think differently about safety than men do for that reason too.
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“When I think about sex, the first things I think about are…”
The biggest difference here is pretty obvious.
Most women say, “How do I keep from getting pregnant from it?” or “Am I ready to get pregnant?”
Men never ask those questions. Even when men do think about pregnancies, getting someone else pregnant is a lot different from getting pregnant.
That leads into a lot more questions about wanting to have sex, when, how much, how often, and with who. Your idea of the best answers to each of those questions depend a lot on whether it would be you getting pregnant or the other person.
That brings us to another difference.
Why do women have higher standards than men do on who they want to have sex with? Because for most of the 7,000,000 years of our evolution since we split off from the chimpanzees, reliable birth control hadn’t been invented yet.
This is where human intelligence combined with our two basic instincts makes everything we do, from food production to religion to sex, more complicated than for any other species. If we were frogs, lizards, birds, or monkeys, we could say that the feeling of wanting to have sex with someone was the feeling of wanting to try to make a pregnancy happen with them, whether it would be happening to you or to the other person. But human intelligence lets us think about our entire lives.
Our chimpanzee instincts for wanting to have sex with each other have worked pretty well for the past 7,000,000 years. But we also understand how sex leads to pregnancy, and how much a pregnancy can affect the lives of the parents, and especially the mother. And we realize— or at least, most of us realize— that for a couple, and especially a woman, to have a baby now, and everything that comes with that, can preclude them from having a different baby later on, when they’re better prepared for it. That’s where the term Planned Parenthood comes from.
In essentially the same way that we have tailbones because we have genes that make us start growing tails and then other genes that make us stop soon afterwards, we have instincts that make us want to have sex with each other, and we have intelligence that we use to figure out the best ways to have sex with each other, so that we can try to find the best balance between our feelings of wanting to have sex and our feelings for wanting to do all the other things we want to do with our lives.
As someone who grew up around farms, I can tell you that the reason we eat with forks and spoons and knives, and the reason we flush the toilet, is because we’re better than farm animals. But for some reason, when it comes to sex, a lot of people suddenly can’t tell the difference between us and chickens, sheep, goats, pigs, cattle, and horses.
If a woman has sex with a man, she wants him to be a man she would be okay having a baby with. For the moment, she’s enjoying the primal feeling of wanting to get pregnant by him. Even if she’s using birth control because she’s smart enough to imagine her life going off in a different direction starting tomorrow morning.
Men don’t have as high of standards on who they want to have sex with because any woman a man can have sex with is a chance to get a woman pregnant and for her to have his baby.
That difference between egg and sperm cells means women are more invested in quality of childbirths and men are more invested in quantity of childbirths.
In a world with reliable birth control readily available to everyone, this means that even though we can all have sex with each other without anyone getting pregnant, we still have different feelings about the best ways to have sex, with who, when, where, and how.
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“When I think about family, the first things I think about are…”
The first part is easy. Women don’t just have higher standards than men do on who they want to have sex with. They also have higher standards than men do on who they go out with and who want to marry, for the same reasons.
Have you ever wondered what mother birds think about all day while they sit on their eggs, keeping them warm? Doesn’t that get boring? Not to a mother bird.
Our instincts focus our attention on doing the things we need to do to survive and reproduce. So women feel more strongly about the importance of spending time with their children than men do.
Why are women more empathic, or more emotionally sensitive, than men? Are women too emotionally sensitive? Are men not emotionally sensitive enough? What’s the right amount of emotionally sensitive for people to be?
Women’s greater physical commitment to childbirth includes the evolution of their brains. Women can hear differences in sounds that men don’t notice. That makes it easier for them to figure out why babies are crying, because when babies cry for different reasons, they sound different. If you’re a male you probably never noticed that before.
Women can see shades of color that men don’t notice. Women have a sharper sense of smell than men do. Those give them better clues in finding food that’s good to eat.
Things like those get more complicated as you move into solving more complicated puzzles involving people. Like, figuring out what you should do when someone is in a bad mood.
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Here’s something else involving family. Have you ever wondered why people are more protective of the women and girls in their families than they are of the men and boys?
Childbirth is a much bigger physical investment for women than it is for men, and the female members of your family have copies of your genes. So you want the women and girls in your family to be safe and to have children with good men. Because if they don’t, it puts the future of your own genes in more danger than when men and boys in your family make bad decisions.
Women have higher standards than men do about who they want to have sex with and who they want to marry, and we all have higher standards for who the women in our families have sex with and marry for the same reasons.
ACT III
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“When I think about socializing, the first things I think of are…”
Something women notice a lot are double standards. These are ways that people think it’s right for a man to do something, but it’s wrong for a woman to do the same thing.
There are different reasons these things happen.
If it’s a woman trying to work in a male dominated industry, that’s fairly simple. If men know that they know how to do the job, and they can tell that women think differently from men, then it’s easy for them to assume that women must not know how to do the job.
Why do we have men’s clothing and women’s clothing?
That’s a tradition. In some long forgotten time, when people were inventing clothes, they figured out how to use whatever they had to make clothes that helped men do whatever they needed to do, and that helped women do whatever they needed to do.
It doesn’t really matter now why those traditions started the way they did. We have a lot more materials to make clothes out of now, and we do a lot more things now.
Every sport has clothing specialized for it now. That’s what makes a football jersey different from a basketball jersey. That’s why we can talk about swimsuits, golf pants, bicycle shorts, and bowling shoes. Any of those clothes are appropriate to wear in some places but not others.
Traditions are the feeling that a lot of people feel the same way about something. So it’s the feeling that people going along with what most people feel is right is the best way to do the thing.
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Why is it okay for women to cry when they’re sad, but not men?
Remember how men have evolved to face more physical danger because we can get hurt on a lot more of our bodies and still be able to reproduce? Supposedly, the more a person feels an emotion, the more they show it. So if a woman gets so sad that she cries, that’s a big sign to the people who care about her that they should do something to help her. Babies and young children cry too, to let their mothers and other people around them know that something is going wrong for them and they need help.
This is a role that men grow into. Women cry essentially for the same reason babies cry. Growing up to be a man means growing up to have more physical ability to face physical danger than women do. That means you also need to develop the courage to face more danger. Men can’t act like women and children, because we’re the ones who face the danger, which keeps women and children safe.
If a man does have something go wrong for him so badly that he cries about it, that can still be a sign to the people around him that he needs help. But who wants to listen to a man cry every time something goes wrong for him?
Think about it. When you say it’s okay for men to cry, how much crying are you talking about?
You’re assuming that someone else is going to do something to solve the problem, instead of them breaking down and crying about it too. Yes it’s okay for everyone to need some help sometimes. But that’s not the same thing as everyone needing a lot of help all the time.
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Now maybe the biggest double standard.
What’s the best number of sexual partners for a person to have? Or the best number of boyfriends or girlfriends for them to have, or the best number of times for them to get married?
That number is always bigger for men than it is for women. If a man says he’s had sex with over 300 women, he sounds like a very successful man. If a woman says she’s had sex with over 300 men, you might wonder what’s wrong with her.
When men are young and want to have a lot of sex, women who like to have a lot of sex are very popular. But when men get older and want to get married, suddenly they want to marry women who haven’t had sex with many men.
Where do those numbers come from? If we’re just talking about consensual sex between men and women, the number of women that men have had sex with must equal the number of men that women have had sex with. If a man has had sex with 300 women, that means 300 women have had sex with him. So why does that tend to make him more attractive but them less attractive?
If a man has sex with 300 women, that’s 300 women he could’ve gotten pregnant. If a woman has sex with 300 men, that’s 300 men who could’ve gotten her pregnant. That man could have a lot of offspring running around in the world. The woman sounds more like the poor woman who lived in the shoe, who had so many children she didn’t know what to do.
So when men get older and want to quit sleeping around and settle down and get married, a woman who hasn’t had many sexual partners seems like she has a lot less drama in her life.
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That leads into another social pattern.
Women compete against each other for men. Wherever two women are attracted to the same man, and they each want all of his attention, he can’t give all of his attention to both of them.
If all women wanted was to have sex with the guy or get pregnant by him, he could have sex with all of them and get all of them pregnant. But if you want a relationship with any kind of commitment in it, that’s what women compete for.
A man with good genes who gets you pregnant and then sticks around to help you raise the kid is usually the best kind. Because then he’s investing his time and energy into raising children who have your genes. That’s a lot better for you than him getting you pregnant and then getting another woman pregnant, and then spending only half of his time and energy helping to raise your kids and the other half of his time and energy helping the other woman raise her kids.
Women avoid physical danger much more than men do because they need a lot more of their bodies to reproduce. But they don’t need to defeat each other physically.
They only need for men to not hook up with other women, or to abandon whichever women they’ve already hooked up with. So if you spread rumors about another woman that make her sound less attractive to men, they’ll pay less attention to her and more attention to you.
What kinds of things make women less attractive to men?
The most powerful rumors relate to how good a woman’s genes are or how good of a mother she would be.
She’s dumb.
She’s immoral.
She’s crazy.
She has a hateful, hostile, destructive personality. Meaning she’s a total bitch.
She makes bad decisions.
She’s unhealthy.
She’s poor.
The people in her family are unhealthy, or make bad decisions, or they’re poor.
Or the biggest one of all: She’s promiscuous. Meaning a slut.
Remember, this is the 21st century. We know how sex works, we know how birth control works, and we can read books about all the emotions people feel surrounding romance and sex. In most of the industrialized world, abortions are legal. There aren’t any problems we don’t know how to overcome.
So we really don’t need to treat some women like angels and others like demons. Because all their numbers together add up to the same number of consensual heterosexual partners that men have had.
ACT IV
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“When I think about self-gratification, the first things I think of are…”
A good relationship is one where you feel good around the other person most of the time. And one where the other person feels good around you most of the time.
We want different things, and we have different reasons for wanting those things. So a good relationship is one where you both feel like you’re getting what you want.
Self gratification is a big part of sex. For recreational sex, self gratification is one of the main goals. The self gratification part of sex is really a more intense version of everything I just said about relationships. You feel good about sex when you feel like it’s making your life better. And the other person feels the same way. So good sex is the kind where you both feel like you’re getting what you want.
That overlaps with a social motivation for sex. Sex, or any other kind of interaction with another person, is a way of communicating with them. Sex is just the most intense version of that.
A good relationship, whether it’s having sex with someone, or hanging out with your friends, or even just meeting someone new, is one where you make the other person feel that you want them to feel good around you.
Now think about how much communication is involved in sex.
There’s seeing the other person there with you, making eye contact, seeing that they’re happy, and seeing them in ways you don’t see them any other time.
There’s hearing each other talk or whisper, hearing each other breathe, and hearing the other person making happy sounds.
There’s touching each other, feeling the warmth of each other’s bodies, and feeling physical contact between you in ways you don’t have with other people any other time.
Then there’s smell and taste. If you like how the other person smells and the taste of their sweat, that’s a good indication that the other person is healthy and your biochemistry is compatible.
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So how are orgasms part of our reproductive instincts?
Just a reminder, this is Track 35 in this series. If you’ve heard everything that’s come before it, you’ll understand what I’m about to say. If you haven’t, you’ll think I’m way oversimplifying it, reducing it, and ignoring centuries and millennia of music and poetry and literature that people have written about romance.
Male orgasms are the feeling of getting a woman pregnant. In your lifelong quest to survive and reproduce, your whole life has been leading up to that moment. In your quest to pass your genes on to the next generation, having sex is the most important thing you’re ever going to do.
So it’s the most powerful physical feeling we have, which brings with it the most powerful emotional feelings that males have. Or at least that we’ve had to that point in their lives.
Why are female orgasms so much more complicated than that? Well think how much more of their time, energy, and bodies women devote to reproducing.
A female orgasm is the feeling that…
The other person cares how you feel.
That they’re putting effort into your relationship.
And that they aren’t just trying to get you pregnant and leave.
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“When I think about self actualization, the first things I think of are…”
How do your reproduction instincts fit with everything else you want to do in life? What’s your idea of a good balance between raising your children and doing everything else you want to do?
If you’re a woman, you’re going to be a lot more physically invested in your children than a man will be in his. You also have a narrower window of opportunity to have them. So if you’re a woman and you want to have kids, a lot more of your 20s and 30s are going to be devoted to that than men’s lives are.
Maybe you’ll have kids with a man who will be as devoted to them as you are. Then again, maybe not.
How do the day to day decisions you make at different stages in your life add up over the course of your life? When you decide where you want to go from here, wherever here is for you, depends a lot on the decisions you’ve made that got you here.
When you wake up in the morning and you think about what you want to do today, how much time you want to spend with your kids, or how much time you want to spend looking for a good partner to have kids with, or how much you want to do to prepare for having kids, adds up over the years.
So once again, when we each make our ideas of normal decisions to try to live our ideas of good lives, we end up making different decisions.
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“When I think of self fulfillment, the first things I think of are…”
Have you ever wondered why it’s usually mothers who pay the most attention in their families to everyone’s health and medical needs, but the majority of medical doctors are men? That’s one easy way to see how people’s different ideas about the best balance between family life and everything else plays out.
Learning to be a medical doctor depends on learning to process a lot of information. That takes natural talent, but it also takes a lot of work. In the US, it takes 11 years of training to become a doctor. If you major in premed in college right out of high school, it will take up all of your 20s. Then there’s more years of hard work ahead of you to establish yourself in your career. By the time you can get a good sense of what to expect at a normal day at work, you’ll be well into your 30s.
In the midst of all that, when is a good time to take a few months off to have a baby, and then start juggling the demands of motherhood with your career?
If you’re a woman and you want to work in medicine but you don’t want to wait until your mid 30s to start having children, a career in nursing is a good choice. So it’s no wonder that the majority of nurses are women.
How many other kinds of jobs are there that put huge demands on people’s time and energy? There’s lawyers, business owners, and politicians, to name a few. In any career where a few people get famous by rising to the top, the people who do that will be the people who invested the time and energy it took to get there. So even in female dominated career paths, it’s easy to end up with mostly male leaders.
Our different levels of interest and intuition into how life works has made the majority of biologists and the majority of psychologists women. But rising to the heights of achievement in either of those fields depends on spending many long hours conducting experiments and many more long hours writing papers about them.
It’s mostly men who are willing to put in that much work. Women are generally better than men are at having lives outside of work.
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“When I think about the fulfillment of self fulfillment, the first things that come to mind are…”
Now we’re talking about people living the best lives imaginable. As you can see by now, we have a lot of different reasons for imagining the best lives we could live.
Here are some big questions in that:
What kinds of romantic relationships do you want to have in that life?
What’s your ideal of the best kinds of partners to have those relationships with?
And are those realistic expectations for you to have of other people?
Or are you imagining your idea of the best life possible and then expecting to meet someone of the opposite gender who wants all of those things too?
ACT V
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If we’re going to talk about the biology of gender differences, now is the time to talk about homosexuality and transgender people.
We don’t know enough about the human genome yet to explain completely how genes create LGBTQ people. But we do know enough to fill in most of the picture.
Simply put, your body and your instincts are two different things. There’s a close connection between the two, but it isn’t a direct connection. In the same basic way, cows have teeth that are good for chewing grass, and they also have stomachs that are good for digesting grass.
Human brains are a lot more complicated than cows’ stomachs, so it takes a lot more genes to create them. That means things don’t always work out perfectly. Sometimes people get genes for being attracted to their own gender. More rarely, people get a lot of the instincts for the other gender. Or even all of them.
The easiest way to get an idea how many genes are involved in our reproductive instincts is to look at how many degrees of bisexual there are, how many different types of gay and lesbian there are, and how many ways people have found to express their non-binary genders. When LGBTQ people do what they feel is right to try to live what feels to them like a normal life, they do a lot of things that other people wouldn’t think of.
After everything homosexual and transgender people have had to do to win respect and equal rights, that probably sounds anticlimactic. But this far into the story of Being Human on Planet Earth, there isn’t much left to unravel.
Instead this shows us another example of how much our reproductive instincts affect our thinking. If you meet a man who doesn’t have hetero cis male reproductive instincts, or a woman who doesn’t have hetero cis female reproductive instincts, it’s easy to feel that there’s something profoundly wrong with that person. There’s something different about how they think on such a primal level that it’s hard to guess how it could’ve happened.
But it’s easy to find hateful people who are carrying on thousands of years of tradition of saying hateful things about them.
It isn’t something profoundly wrong with LGBTQ people. It isn’t even profoundly different. It’s just something that is profound that’s different. Because LGBTQ people are just like anyone else, except for one main difference.
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This isn’t supposed to be the final word on any of these topics. This is just the beginning of a huge, ongoing conversation. If we start with biology, and divide human behavior into categories, it’s easy for us to have reasonable conversations about why different things make sense to us.
Men and women can’t feel the same feelings as each other on a lot of things. But we can use cognitive empathy to recognize why many situations affect the other side differently than they affect us. And to recognize how the other side’s reactions are good ideas, given their different decision making factors.
