We are Animals, but also not Animals
A little while back Matt Walsh and Helen Joyce got into a little internet spat. As you do. The essence of the disagreement was that MW largely blamed radical feminism for the current GenderWoo™ free-for all, whereas HJ attributed it more to misogyny and the oppression of women.
I kind of agree with them both, to some extent.
There are aspects of the GenderWoo™ nonsense that are deeply misogynistic (not to mention homophobic), but I also think feminism, in its most radical manifestations, might have been responsible for putting the crack in the dam in the first place.
It’s something I have been pondering over for some time and I can’t say I have come to any great conclusion or original insight. It is, as they say, a work in progress.
But what has prompted today’s post is a magnificent essay by a Substack writer called Zinnia. It’s very thought-provoking and explores a ‘hidden’ aspect of the whole man vs woman narrative. It’s a long read, but well worth your time. It’s her first article and I very much hope she writes more.
What Zinnia focuses on is sex. Not the reality of biological sex so much, but sex of the four-legged foxtrot variety. It focuses mostly on women, but the whole piece is an honest recognition of the importance of sex and the different ways (in general) that men and women perceive, respond to, and pursue it.
I do not think we can have a fully sensible conversation about the whole man vs woman societal dynamic (men are from Mars and God only knows where women are from, sort of thing) without recognizing the crucial influence of biology.
It is, I think, critical to appreciate the influence that evolution has had not only on our bodies, but also our behaviours and thinking.
The idea arose, largely driven from within feminism, that men and women differ in a few physical biological essentials, but in all other respects they are essentially equal. Any differences in thought, behaviour, or temperament were socially constructed and not (at least partially) inherent.
You can see how this way of thinking opens the door to the notion that, well, if the only essential difference is in the body, then all we need to is to change that a bit and we can turn men into women and vice versa. This blurring of the distinction opens the door to the possibility of a revision of how we think of what a woman, or a man, actually is.
If being a woman is, largely, a social construct then all you have to do to ‘be’ a woman is to adopt those social constructs.
The original aim of the radical feminists was to argue against sex-based stereotypes, but they planted a seed that’s grown into the Gender Woo Triffid™.
What they should have done is to have embraced the differences1 and recognized that, whilst not hard-wired by biology, they have been influenced significantly by biology.
This would automatically have made it much more difficult for someone to claim they ‘are’ a woman simply because they adopt the typical behaviours of a woman.
Now, to be fair to feminism, it’s my view that things did need to change. How much and to what extent is a matter of debate, but we have certainly had a male-dominated society for much of our history. The problem with a lot of radical feminism is that it sets men in opposition to women.
This is, of course, all part and parcel of the standard woke programming that cannot think in terms of anything outside of the tiresomely puerile oppressor/oppressed narrative.
What’s needed, if one is not some bitter and twisted fruitloop like the extreme radfems or one of the nutters of MGTOW, is to find a way for men and women to work together in a way that is fair to both and that respects the differences.
And where do these differences come from? Ultimately, they all arise from our biology.
That’s quite a strong statement that seems to eschew the role of social conditioning. But it’s not at odds. The biological differences become acted upon in any fledgling society of sufficient complexity in a way that can reinforce and amplify any behavioural differences. It’s a complicated and dynamic system of feedback, but it all starts with the inherent biology.
We were, once, more animals than human. One only needs to take the most cursory peek into the animal kingdom to realize that there are significant differences between male and female behaviours across most of the animal kingdom.
There’s no ‘oppressor/oppressed’ dynamic, no malign ‘patriarchal’ influence, driving this. It’s an adaptive evolutionary response that results in better survivability for one’s offspring.
The notion that biological influences, through evolution, have not played a role in shaping the behavioural sex differences in humans is, frankly, absurd.
Played a role, not programmed into.
The difference in humans is that we’re able to think about those behaviours, to modify them to a greater or lesser extent, to consciously re-shape the way we behave and interact. This introduces a different dynamic which can also, itself, be acted upon by evolution.
We evolved to be (a bit) different in body, thought, and deed and as we constructed more complex societies those differences became manifested in societal rules, expectations, and roles and were amplified and acted upon in a variety of ways depending on which version of a society you found yourself in.
In other words, social ‘construction’ acted upon existing biological differences in body, thought, and deed.
But we cannot fully ‘escape’ our legacy as animals, no matter how much we might want to.
One of the things evolution has ‘hard-wired’ into us (in general) is a desire to procreate. How could it be otherwise?
A species that was somewhat indifferent to the production of the next generation would not last very long. There are only so many headaches one can have before you’re fucked2 as a species.
And so, surprise, surprise, men and women desire one another. That desire, of course, kind of manifests (in general) in different ways. This rather crude, but funny, joke is a recognition of that
My girlfriend asked me to make love to her like they do in the movies.
So I pushed her onto her knees, grabbed her hair, and rogered her from behind. Then I came all over her face.
She wasn’t happy.
Turns out we watch different movies
Unfortunately, there really isn’t any reliable way to ‘socially construct’ this rather gross behaviour out of men. We can moderate it, but you’re not going to get the average bloke to be wholly indifferent to porn. Sorry - it just isn’t going to work. Men are not, in general, wired to have romance as their first priority.
We can temper those primal urges to a great extent - and temper them we must - but we cannot entirely eradicate them, either.
The reason why dads are, perhaps, over-protective of their daughters when it comes to their latest “sweet and loving” boyfriend is because they were young men once, too.
Zinnia’s article goes into detail about the essential ‘paradox’ at the heart of growing into womanhood; you hate the ‘male gaze’ but you also want to be desired.
This battle of desires is all baked into us by evolution. The men want to sow their seed and the women want to find the best mate who will ensure the survivability of their babies. OK, it’s a bit more complicated than that but, at a subconscious level, this is the prime evolutionary driver that’s operating.
It’s ludicrous to just tell men to stop operating in that way, just as it’s ludicrous to tell women to stop bothering about their appearance so much3. It’s the same kind of wishful thinking that we find in a lot of idealistic movements which, essentially, boil down to the phrase “wouldn’t it be nice if everyone was nice”.
We need to be realistic and take into account the differences in desire and find a way to accommodate all of this sensibly. Pretending that men can be shaped into having exactly the same perspectives and desires as women is utter folly4. It just isn’t going to happen. Similarly, men need to recognize that women are not going to be shaped into their fantasy ‘angel in the kitchen, devil in the bedroom’.
We’re different, in general, and not some ‘inferior’ or ‘superior’ versions of each other.
In a way, and in very broad ‘transactional’ terms, marriage was a decent stab at this accommodation. Men got access to sex in exchange for their role as protector and provider, and women got the safe environment to raise their children in exchange for sex. Of course that’s a gross oversimplification and somewhat insulting to both sexes, but it’s a factor that we can see even today in our ‘modern’ world that has largely become decoupled from the rigours of evolution.
This centuries-long ‘accommodation’, as imperfect as it was, as unfair to women as it sometimes was, is breaking down today and being replaced with a hideous kind of sexual free-for-all that is lust-driven and materialistic in nature.
Is it any wonder why a lot of young people are opting out of, finding ways to escape, both this spiritually bankrupt hedonism and the inadequacy of the ‘modern’ marriage and the grinding daily struggle to subsist?
If some young women see their life ahead as being some glorified fuck-buddy in a soulless, loveless, relationship being serviced (as dictated by the ‘romance’ of porn)5 by their man, is it any wonder they choose to try to opt out of being female altogether?
Some women embrace this and wilfully exchange their sexual favours (either for real or on OnlyFans) in exchange for material security.
But, instead, if we zoom out a bit and stop focusing on the nitty-gritty, the sexual merry-go-round of desire and consummation, and ask are we getting happier?
The answer seems to be a resounding No!
For all of our ‘progressiveness’, the loosening of centuries-old restrictive ‘norms’, we’re not doing a decent job of actually making us happier.
In the woke perspective, I suppose, we’ll all finally be happy when every ‘oppressive’ structure has been dismantled and we’re all free to live without any constraints.
I doubt that, very much.
We may bemoan all the ‘social constructions’ that have existed for millennia, but why did they arise in the first place? Was it just wicked oppressive patriarching by men? Or are there alternative explanations rooted in biology and the success of the species? Perhaps, we can admit it was a mix of both?
The various societal ‘structures’ and behaviours have arisen, initially, as a result of the various biological differences in body, thought, and deed. Sure, they’ve been amplified (often unfairly) and acted upon by society, but they all existed for reasons that might not wholly be explained by vicious patriarchal influences on behalf of men.
By removing all of these ‘norms’, these millennia-long conventions, we’re adrift at the moment and our evolutionary ‘programming’ has had nowhere near enough time to adjust or adapt. It’s all happened within the space of a century and we don’t know what to do with our new-found ‘freedom’.
I certainly don’t want to go back to times when women were viewed as a kind of second-class citizen, but I also recognize that there may have been unintended consequences to this rapid change. We need to figure out what worked and why, and what didn’t work and why.
And that might take some awkward recognition of the role of evolutionary biology in all of this.
Whatever we’re currently doing it’s not working; we’re not, in general, happier than we were.
Feminism has brought about much-needed changes in the way women were treated. I applaud many, if not most, of those changes. You might argue that we still live in a ‘patriarchal’ society, but it’s a much, much weaker patriarchy than, say, 50 years ago. Yet despite these advances we see that women are not, in general ‘happier’ than they were.
We need to figure this out, because something’s not right.
And that’s as far as I’ve got with my ruminations. I might be prodding the wrong hole, just to bring it all back down to the level of the gutter, but things are, manifestly, not going well at the moment in the whole sex/desire/society thing - and we might need to pause for a while to think, because we can think, about our survivability as a species.
Obviously some discernment is required here. Not everything is biologically influenced and there are strong cultural components too. It’s complicated, but that’s no excuse for ignoring the influence of biology on ‘performative’ aspects of sex entirely.
In this case, not literally
Obviously the phrase “not all” applies here, and elsewhere
I don’t know, but I’ve read that this difference is quite noticeable in the gay scene. Gay men tend to be, shall we say, a little more raunchy in their approach than gay women (typically). I have read that gay male orgies are a thing whereas gay female orgies, not so much.
One horrific thing I read about recently was the increase in young women being treated for things like rectal prolapse as a result of being pressured by their boyfriends into having anal sex. Yikes. This is not at all natural and can only have arisen from a society saturated with porn.
There’s so much to unpack here but I’ll, for now, focus on one thing. Pornography destroys everything it touches. Period. I’ve seen it over-and-over. I was a police officer for 25-years before it was common to see women in police work. The men I worked with were my brothers and we became friends. But never lovers. I saw their marriages destroyed by pornography. Pornography is a strong addiction. That dopamine rush is thrilling. For some men those fantasy women were too strong a draw and dulled their view of their wife. Some “convinced” their wives to engage in it with them…and eventually even that became too mundane. So they tried swinging. All their marriages ended. And for a female perspective I was their confidant. They were miserable at the loss of their families. But had a difficult time even acknowledging that their pornography addiction was cheating their wives and themselves of a loving, long-term marriage.
These days, with the easy availability of pornography everywhere I’m sure the women may be gaining in this form of self-destruction.
As more and more women that have skipped marriage and children mature in their work roles, more women will be CEOs and challenge the "patriarchy" a term I am growing extremely tired of. Men in many cases are on their heels (no trans-pun intended) with women calling the shots. Of course the irony is lost on many woman that they are in control while screeching about the patriarchy, yet it continues. I believe we are at a point where it is up to women to decide what they want. Men need to focus on being the best they can be, but the idea that men are just going to figure out a way to out-earn women so they are attractive enough to be dateable is silly. We live in an era where women can make 100k/month showing their butthole on Only Fans, or in many other less overtly sexual ways that men simply can't match. Women are in charge. If they want to look down on men, they can. If women choose to see the value in men, that is also up to them. But, trying to force women to adopt any particular strategy is a lost cause. Like most things these days, I imagine a lot more pain before anything improves.