Feminism And Evo Psych

To say that feminism and evolutionary psychology have a “bad relationship” would be one of the greater understatements we could make.  Unfortunately, the problem is equal parts bigotry and ignorance.

Evolutionary psychology is a relatively new field that examines things like memory, habits, and yes, gender, from a modern evolutionary perspective.  The MRM frequently bring up topics discussed in evolutionary psychology, but many people seem very confused about their reasons for doing so.  When the MRM bring it up, they generally are trying to show why current gender interactions are the way that they are.  Even we have used evolutionary psychology to help explain things in at least two of our basics posts.  People often don’t understand this, though, and tend to hear ”this is why things should stay this way.”  Just because something is natural, doesn’t make it right.  Indeed, this is actually a fallacy in and of itself, the “naturalistic fallacy.”  They assume the MRM is trying to say that because this is the way things are, this is the way it should remain; that the fact that these roles are the product of nature inherently justifies them.  For most MRAs, though, this is not the case.  What they’re actually trying to do is explain things in a rational fashion so we can better understand how to fix them.  

Feminists, however, do not like it when MRAs bring up this field.  Not at all.  See, most of evolutionary psychology contradicts virtually all of mainstream feminist theory.  One example is a central tenet of almost all feminism: patriarchy theory.  This theory suggests that men hold the majority of power in the world and use it to benefit men while oppressing women.  Most radical feminists (and a scary number of mainstream ones) also believe that the patriarchy was created by men.  Evolutionary theory clearly contradicts this, demonstrating how gender roles were created because they were necessary for our survival.  We needed a division of labor and pregnant women couldn’t hunt, and so they stayed home to raise the kids while the men went out and did all the dirty work.  This itself was strongly influenced by the persistence-hunter nature of early humans and our unusually long infancy and childhood, which in turn were further enabled by the division of labor they produced.

Once we understand this, we can easily see how these roles are oppressive to both genders.  By this same line of reasoning, we also see why women’s issues are being given all the attention while nobody is trying to rectify men’s issues.  Women are seen as needing protecting while men are seen as disposable.  While MRAs agree that while these gender roles were useful in the past, they are more or less irrelevant in the present.  Due to the technological developments of the last 100 years, the division of labor between the genders that was once necessary is slowly but surely becoming obsolete.  MRAs have realized this, and are working to get rid of these now useless gender roles.  

The thing is, feminists don’t want people to understand this because if they did, the feminist movement would basically implode in on itself.  The movement relies on convenient myths and fabrication that stem from other convenient myths and fabrications, the vast majority of which are not supported by science, as well as evolutionary psychology.  This is also another possible reason why they try discredit the MRM’s attempts at using the field to explain things.  In the end, evolutionary psychology is an ally to the ones who truly want to bring about change and equity, and an enemy to the bigoted who only use the label of equality for their own selfish gain.

If you would like to learn more about this topic, feel free to check out this link, where we discuss bits of it in greater detail.

Some thoughts about evo psych

I’m not going into the methodic aspects of evo psych, because they’re just bad (just-so stories, unfalsifiable hypotheses…). Even if they manage to make successful predictions, that still doesn’t exclude the possibility of alternative explanations, especially since said predictions are informed by observations of modern society. However, they could be onto something when it comes to describing males. After all, those descriptions are not clouded by misogynistic beliefs.

But when it comes to women, the obliviousness to the oppressive workings of society is just baffling. Like, ooh, we make a cross-cultural study, ‘cause that’s totally gonna prove hypergamy (“marrying up”) is a universal adaptive trait! How blinded by privilege one must be to make such a conclusion, given the fact that women worldwide are economically disadvantaged, especially WOC?
It’s such a Western white privileged assumption that all women marry for romantic or merely personal reasons and if you happen to observe that they “marry up”, that must be some subconscious adaptive mechanism, because biotruth!!!!11!
No, there’s no possibility that women do that as a conscious, pragmatic decision… you know, some women don’t have the privilege to marry out of love, which, BTW, doesn’t make them greedy, gold-digging b*tches. Not to speak of arranged marriages and social norms informing reasons to marry which are later reflected in your stupid survey as if they were basically the same for all women…

Oh, and, female reproductive strategy? Women are picky, right? How about the fact that birth would possibly put an end to a woman’s life? Why is that never discussed, huh? What if the woman already has children and doesn’t want to get pregnant, because she has to take care of her offspring and can’t afford to fucking die? Or help other women to raise their children? Maybe the fear of dying as a result of pregnancy is adaptive? I could also claim that - just so.

And why is that males, according to evo psych, tend to go for young, “neotenous” (euphemism for “childlike”) women? If the male strategy is to “spread the seed” and all women are picky, then every male trying to mate with a woman does also have at least some opportunity costs. So if you leave the woman with the offspring, how about making sure that she’s able to survive and teach the children survival tactics? ‘Cause a woman who is young, immature and submissive wouldn’t be my first pick when it comes to survival competence and reproductive success as a result of that, because the next generation would also have to pass my genes, right?
Oh, and weird inconsistency for the fact that males are supposed to leave as soon as the fuck is over, but women “choose a provider of resources”. 
And why aren’t males standing in queues to donate to sperm banks? I’m not saying that they don’t want to spread their “precious” seed at all, but has it ever occurred to the evo psych crowd that there might be more into that than just a reproductive strategy?

And why is reproductive behavior in animal species such as gorillas framed as “having a harem”? What if we lived in a matriarchal society. Would we call it a group of female gorillas having a personal sperm donator? I’m just sayin’, because analogies to the animal world are often used as justifications for patriarchal institutions and I’m quite sure that patriarchal ways of thinking are also playing into observations of animal behavior.