ACT I
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We’ve been talking about gender differences for 6 episodes now. Men and women reproduce differently, so our brains have evolved different reproductive instincts.
Each pregnancy is a lot more physical investment for a woman than it is for a man.
Because of that, men can have children much later into their lives than women can.
Because of that, there are always more fertile men in the world than fertile women.
Because of that, a lot of men’s idea of common sense is based on competition and potential competition with other men for opportunities to get women pregnant. And to get women to raise their children.
For the same reason, because pregnancies are such greater physical investments for women, a lot of women’s idea of common sense is the importance of a good home life for themselves, their children, andhopefully a man to help her provide for, protect, and raise her children.
That brings us to one of feminists’ favorite words:
Patriarchy.
That big pattern of behavior where men seem to work together to keep women down.
How did it start? And why does it still happen today?
We can see a lot of clues to that now.
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Patriarchy is a political system.
Not in the sense that democracy is a political system.
But it’s a pattern of political stuff that keeps happening the same way.
Feminism is a political movement.
It’s a whole lot of people who have the same basic problem with a political system and who keep trying to change it.
Remember that evolutionary psychology was pioneered in the 1990s. That means the feminists back in 1900 who organized the struggles to win women’s right to vote didn’t know about it.
Different branches of the feminist movement have organized around different political ideologies over the centuries. Like Marxism, Libertarianism, or Anarchism.
That was enough to organize the struggles that overcame the biggest legal inequalities between men and women. Like the right to vote, the right to own property, the right to education, and so on.
But Patriarchy begins with individual decisions by individual people. We can’t solve the problem completely until we solve it on that level.
If a woman today feels like her boyfriend doesn’t treat her fairly in some ways, how is she supposed to use Socialism to improve their relationship?
So here’s a disclaimer.
This is episode 41 in this series. If you’ve heard most of this series by now, what I have to say in this episode is just one more step down the path from the previous episode. But if you’re just now starting to listen to this series and you believe in a pre-1990 version of feminism, you’re probably going to hate the way I talk about male and female reproductive instincts and how they affect our thinking.
ACT II
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Imagine a great collective amnesia spread over the world tonight, and tomorrow morning we all woke up with no memory of the history of gender relations.
We all agreed that everyone should have the choice to do anything they could with the mind and body they have. Because we couldn’t remember ever hearing about anything else.
How would we divide up decision making between men and women?
Men are better at thinking about some things and women are better at thinking about other things.
If we put whoever is best at thinking about certain things in charge of making those kinds of decisions, men would be mostly in charge of some things, and women would be mostly in charge of other things.
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How should we organize our families?
Wouldn’t it make sense for women to be the heads of households? After all, women, unlike men, always know for a fact which children are theirs. Even when women adopt children, the fact that they tend to spend more time with their children than men do makes children feel a stronger bond to their mother than they do to their father.
But that’s where the problem begins.
Men compete against other men for opportunities to get women pregnant.
If you’re a man and your wife or girlfriend gets pregnant, how certain do you want to be that the baby is yours?
We all try to maximize the survival rates of our genes. Planning for a future of raising your own child feels like the most direct path to passing on your genes.
But if you’re being tricked into raising another man’s child, you’re not maximizing the survival rates of your genes. You’re maximizing the survival rates of another man’s genes.
So part of men maximizing the survival rates of their genes means being more possessive of women than women are of men.
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It takes a man and a woman to have a baby.
Then someone needs to take care of the baby.
Someone also has to go out and bring home food for the family. Women tend to want to spend more time with their children because it took them much more physical effort to have them. Men tend to spend less time with their children because they’re usually the ones who go out to bring home the food.
If we forgot all of our cultural traditions about gender relations, we would forget all our one-sided stories about men getting women pregnant and women raising men’s children. But even in a story of men and women both using their minds and bodies to have children together, women would still tend to spend more time at home with their children than men would.
So what does that mean for decision making between men and women outside the home? When men go out to bring home the food, they meet a lot of other men.
That means men to compete against for food. Or rather, for wealth and social status. Because the more wealth and social status you have, the more you can use it to provide for your family. Or to attract women, for men who don’t have families yet.
In America today it’s a lot of work to get elected mayor, governor, or senator. But if you do, you get a lot of stuff that’s valuable to families. Which means you get a lot of stuff that’s attractive to a lot of women.
So political power is always going to be attractive to a lot of men.
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That’s where the problem really takes off.
Wealth and power are things men will always want to compete for. The more of it there is, the harder they compete. But that doesn’t guarantee that the people who are the best at winning the competitions are the best at making decisions.
Powerful people usually like being powerful. They usually use some of their power, or a lot of their power, to try to keep their power. It’s fairly rare that powerful people want to use their power to make it easier for other people to compete against them.
ACT III
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If you’re a man trying to work your way up in a highly competitive male dominated field, and a woman finds a way to overcome all the obstacles she faced in breaking into your field, what should you do?
In your highly competitive field, she’s one more person you have to compete against. The easiest way for you to win the competition against her would be to put more obstacles in her path.
If you and all your men friends assume that doctors and senators and firefighters and truck drivers are supposed to be men because they’re male dominated fields, and you notice a lot of differences between how men think and how women think, and you assume hat means women don’t know how to do those jobs, it would be easy for you and your men friends to agree that you should stand in the way of women working their ways up in your field.
And it would be easy to get more men to agree with you. Because who would want to work in a field that was led by people who don’t seem to know what they’re doing?
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If you’re a man competing against other men, is eliminating women from the competition really the best way to do it? Why not get women to help you in the competition?
If you’re going to compete, shouldn’t you maximize your competitiveness? What if that means giving women conditions that they’re willing to accept, even though they aren’t fair?
If a woman gets hired for a job, doing the same work as male coworkers, should she be paid the same amount of money for it? You probably think it’s obvious that she should.
But the owner of the company is in business to make money. If he can save a dollar or two an hour by paying her less, that’s more money he can invest into his company to compete with business rivals. And if he knows that all his business rivals would do the same thing, he can be sure that the woman will accept what he pays her, because no one else would pay her more.
If she has children she needs to feed, she needs a job and an income, and she probably can’t afford to worry that it isn’t fair. Even if she doesn’t have kids, if all she wants is a stable life, accepting a job at a lower wage gives her a more stable life than risking getting fired by demanding more money. But for her, the end result of the company owner saving money is that she ends up with less of it.
Less money for her means she ends up with fewer choices on what to use it for. Fewer choices on what to use her money for means fewer choices on what to do in life.
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Now think about the math of there always being more fertile men in the world than fertile women.
Why would so many men feel it’s a good idea to limit the choices women have in life?
A woman who can do anything she wants with her life can meet as many men as she wants.
I’m sure many women don’t see a problem with that. And don’t even see why anyone would. If you’re looking for a nice guy to marry, why shouldn’t you have that right?
Well guess what.
If you meet 50 men over the course of your life who you’re attracted to to some extent, but you only want to marry one of them, that might mean the one you marry is the 50th one you meet.
That means a lot of the other 49 men don’t want you to meet 50 men.
Or even if the one you marry was the 46th one you met, a lot of the first 45 men you meet don’t want you to meet 46 men.
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Do men only compete against each other individually? Or do men also join together in groups to compete against other groups of men?
How does a group of men limit the competition within their group so they can work together to compete harder against other groups of men?
One easy way to do that is to impose limits on how men within a society are allowed to compete against each other. That’s why we have laws against assault and murder. But we also have a military.
When one man kills another man, we call it murder. But when a group of men kills a group of men from another country, we call that a war.
We have laws that distinguish accidents and justifiable homicide from murder. We have laws about declaring wars, and rules of engagement for the military during wars, which control who the military fights against and when.
The point is, our very concept of America being a country means we legitimize Americans using a greater amount of violence against people of other countries than we do against our own citizens. Every country with a military does that.
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How else do we limit competition among men?
We have laws and morals about marriage and adultery. We have morals and ethics about dating and relationships, whether you’re seeing other people, or you’re in a monogamous relationship. If you tell the other person you don’t want to see anyone else, but then you do, we call that cheating on them.
Why is it that if a man is flirting with a woman and she tells him she’s not interested, he probably won’t stop? But if she tells him she has a boyfriend he probably will?
Is it because men just naturally don’t respect what women want? Or is it because men are very perceptive of their chances in the competition with other men?
If a man flirts with a single woman who tells him she’s not interested, she could still change her mind.
But if she says she has a boyfriend, that’s another man who already has her attention way more than you do. And he has a much more primal motivation to compete against you than you have to compete against him.
How often do you hear of a man assaulting another man because he wouldn’t leave his girlfriend alone?
And how often do you hear of a man assaulting another man because he wanted to ask his girlfriend for her phone number?
And on top of all that, if a woman already has a boyfriend, she could already be pregnant. If she is, what good will getting her phone number do you?
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What happens when women interfere with the competition among men?
How are men supposed to plan on how to win that way? If men limit what women can do about how we compete, that makes it easier for men to agree with each other on rules for how we compete.
The big example of that now is the end of women’s rights to abortions at the federal level. Obviously those laws control what women are allowed to do. Why do religious conservatives want those laws so badly?
Think about how much reproductive technology people had invented 2,000 years ago.
How did family planning work back then? How did people put their feelings about reproduction into words to develop reproductive morals that would be easy for people to remember and easy for people to cooperate with overall?
What’s the minimum thing a man has to do to reproduce?
Get a woman pregnant.
What’s the minimum thing a woman has to do to reproduce?
Give birth to a baby.
Add to that the fact that men are more possessive of women, and that they spend more of their time outside their homes, competing with other men for opportunities to get women pregnant.
So what is a law that bans abortions, but a way for men to limit their competition for women by determining, in the simplest way possible, when we’ve won that competition?
For all the talk about rights to life, morality, and religion, we can see that fundamentally, the debate about whether life begins at conception or at birth is a debate about whether we should use men’s reproductive instincts or women’s reproductive instincts as the basis for our abortion laws.
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Why do so many so-called pro-life people also oppose restrictions on guns even when guns are being used by mass shooters to kill school children?
And why do they oppose things like spending money on schools, free day care, accessible health care, school lunch programs, and affordable tuition?
These so-called pro-life people only care about children being born. They don’t seem to care about keeping children alive or investing in their futures.
In any situation where people might be able to get what they need, or they might not, men can see it as a competition. Or see a way to turn it into a competition.
One way or another, whoever gets the most of what they need to live, gets the best life. Owning more guns and paying less money for taxes are both ways for people to be more competitive against other people.
Fundamentally, that debate between the maximization of competition versus the quality of raising children is still the debate between men’s reproductive instincts and women’s reproductive instincts.
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If we all forgot all of our history of gender relations, we’d still reinvent the foundation of Patriarchy just by everyone making
the best decisions
they could think of
in the situations
they’re in
for themselves
and the people
and things
they care about.
It’s only by seeing how the easiest choices for individual people to make add up to something we don’t want that we can see why we need to make different choices.
Now our mass amnesia has finally worn off.
How have people throughout our history making all those easy choices built up to where we are now? How did these male reproductive instincts get turned into our cultural traditions?
Think about the history of farming.
How did the world’s first agricultural civilization expand?
By population growth.
If population growth was the key, or at least, one of the keys, to the strength of empires, then people who live in empires want population growth.
Emperors especially want population growth.So do the other highest-ranking people in the empire. So they told a lot of stories about the morality of population growth.
How do you maximize population growth?
By maximizing births.
All those children who grow up poor and who want better lives as adults can find them just over the border, by conquering land that currently belongs to a weaker country, and expanding the empire. Or they can die trying and still help expand the empire.
Where did the world’s first agricultural civilization arise?
In the Middle East.
Where did Christianity originate?
In the Middle East.
What’s the most powerful country in the world today?
The United States.
What religion do most Americans believe in?
Christianity.
So we can trace a direct line of cultural inheritance from the first, and most powerful agricultural civilizations in the world to the United States today.
Male reproductive instincts were encoded in the stories people of the first empires told about what made them so powerful.
And those stories have been passed down all the way to us.
ACT IV
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What else can we learn from history?
What happened in the US after women got the right to vote in 1920? Our country changed a lot after that. Soon we got laws against child labor. We got laws for 40 hour work weeks. We got workers’ compensation and other laws that protect workers’ health and safety.
Our country turned into less of a competition among men and more of a stable home life.
Whenever women gain equal rights to men in things like voting, education, owning property, or operating businesses, here or anywhere else in the world, their society becomes more like a family and less like a war. Because women are better at empathizing with people than men are.
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Competition for natural resources is what got us into the environmental crisis. Why should we think that slight alterations to how we compete for resources will get us back out?
As the saying goes, if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
Any kind of good outcome to the environmental crisis depends on Planet Earth becoming more like a family and less like a war. Regardless of what you call it, any kind of competition for survival ends up feeling like a war to the people who are losing at it.
If people are competing just to be able to live, to get the food, water, farmland, and whatever else they need, they’ll resort to anything to try to win.
The kinds of problems we face now are the kind that female leadership is best at solving. Any kind of positive outcome to the environmental crisis depends on most of the people in the world working together.
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So how do we smash the Patriarchy?
By dismantling the ideas it’s founded on.
We need new stories about who ware and what we should do that aren’t based on male reproductive instincts. Better education is an obvious good place to start.
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What happens when we know how to talk to each other about gender differences and sexuality?
We’ve been talking about gender difference and sexuality for 7 episodes. If we start with human biology, it’s just a discussion about why people have good reasons for wanting different things.
What happens when we don’t know how to talk to each other about gender and sexuality?
If I’m a man and you’re a woman, and we both live in America, we interact with each other somehow. Maybe we’re trying to have a baby together. Or maybe we’re just voting in the same presidential race and paying our taxes to the same government.
If you want something for reasons I can’t understand, and I want something for reasons you can’t understand, we don’t have any way to work together to find a best overall outcome for both of us.
If we don’t know how to cooperate with each other and we can’t ignore each other, that means we’re working against each other.
If we feel like we’re working against each other on something important, we’re going to start feeling resentful and distrustful of each other. We’re going to start feeling like we’re competing against each other. And if we’re competing against each other, when either one of us gets an advantage in the competition, we’re going to use it to try to get more advantages.
And that’s what Patriarchy is.
It’s an ongoing competition between men and women where men usually win.
Fundamentally, it’s a bad relationship between a man and a woman, that’s been going on for thousands of years, spread all over the world.
ACT V
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These are all just patterns we can see in society that follow from genes making copies of themselves in two different ways, and creating human psychology in the process.
If we use human biology as our starting point for understanding our own and each others’ ideas and feelings, that makes everyone’s point of view a normal point of view. Then we’re just talking about what each of us likes and wants and needs, where we all have good reasons for thinking and feeling the way we do.
You want to destroy the Patriarchy all the way down to the individual level?
That starts with us learning to have better relationships with each other at the individual level.
