Mick Hartley

The danger with evolutionary psychology – admitting that men and women are different not just physically but also psychologically – is of course that it can be used as a justification for all kinds of old-school misogyny, along the lines of: men are just naturally better at…..whatever – from driving, all the way up to critical thinking and philosophising and science. Hence the understandable if regrettable hostility from feminists, who've historically tended to push for a blank slate view of the human brain. Regrettable, that is, because Judith Butler and her postmodern Queer Theory cohorts saw the open door and marched right through.

An item in today's Times:

According to a new study, the sight of Del Boy falling through a bar in Only Fools and Horses or Laurel and Hardy getting themselves into yet another fine mess might also be more amusing if you’re male — because men tend to engage with the world in a “more superficial” way than women.

The research looked at how more than 3,300 adults responded to cartoons that had appeared in newspapers and magazines from the 1930s to the modern day. The results showed that men tended to rate slapstick jokes — those that were largely visual and involved some sort of unexpected incident or pratfall — more highly than women.

Meanwhile, women rated cartoons that had a large verbal component and that were about relationships, society or politics more highly than men.

The study was overseen by Professor Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist at the University of Oxford. In a paper published in the International Journal of Humor Research he suggests that the results reflect deep-rooted differences in how the sexes navigate the world and how they build social bonds.

Dunbar and his co-author Emma Stirling-Middleton argue in their study that “women’s relationships are generally more complex than men’s.”

It fits nicely into the old idea that women are better socially while men are – maybe – better non-verbally. Stereotype or profound truth? Who knows. There's no way a study like this can differentiate the innate from the culturally-acquired – though it does make itself presentable for modern consumption by emphasising the yes-men-are really-a-bit-dim line.

Anyway, Nina Welsch takes an interesting line on this and on related matters in The Critic. Feminism has a women problem:

A darkly welcome side effect of the cultural stranglehold of gender identity is the overdue shattering of progressive illusions. Men and women are not basically the same — physically nor behaviourally. “You can be whoever you want to be” sounds nice but is unsustainable for a functioning society when taken to its logical end point. 

The gender wars have also meant some uncomfortable reckonings with the facts of female nature. We have, for example, had to rethink the idea that women, as a rule, have each other’s backs. The sisterhood, it turns out, is a myth. […]

It is feminism’s best and worst kept secret that women bully and dehumanise other women as much as men do. To scratch the surface of female (anti)social behaviour leads to the squeamish territory of evolutionary psychology, hence why it is downplayed or evaded. There is a divide, if not quite yet an inhibiting schism, within the gender critical movement between “reactionary feminists” and “gender abolitionist” feminists (although some straddle both sides). The former see it in women’s interests to acknowledge innate psychological differences in males and females, the latter does not. 

In fairness, it is understandable why certain radical feminists are highly wary of what they see as “biological essentialism”. Bad faith evolutionary theory has been historically used to portray women as intellectually and cognitively inferior to men (males are simply programmed to do things like pilot planes and solving equations and women to hoovering and mopping up children), not to mention weaponised against sex-nonconforming people, gay men and lesbians. There are perhaps concerns that spotlighting the misguided feminist ideals that underpin parts of gender/queer theory, gives free reign for reactionary types to blame the entire mess on us wummin and our family-destroying female supremacy mission, rather than, say, pornography, misogyny and hyper-individualism encouraged by big tech and consumerism. I have been hesitant to engage with this subject myself. The last thing I want to do is open the door to people who want an excuse to smear all women as irrational.

However dirty the bathwater, though, throwing the baby out with it is never a good idea. One thing this battle for sex-based rights, child safeguarding and freedom of speech has made evident is that twisting and deconstructing the truth to serve a delusional narrative, however well-intentioned, leads to disastrous outcomes. Moreover, understanding of our evolutionary psychology can be liberating as well as deeply discomfiting. The research of Professor Joyce Benenson, for instance, whose conclusions are derived both from intensive study of children’s social development and primatology, offers constructive and compassionate insight into why female people (on average) are prone to compete, conform and express conflict in the uniquely complex way we do, and how our pseudo-egalitarian yet exclusionary tendencies come from our comparatively greater preoccupation with survival and protecting our kin. From Benenson’s non-partisan findings, depressing but illuminating dots can be joined as to potentially why, in the scrabble for social status and safety in the gender wars and powderkeg of identity politics, women who seek to benefit choose to disdain reality-based feminists rather than stand with them, and why, without major incentive, they are unlikely to switch teams.