Given these facts, the EPs suggest, men will naturally be inclined to pursue multiple partners. Their efforts, from an evolutionary point of view, will be put into finding a beautiful woman (genetically more appealing), finding as many partners as possible, and honing their physical skills in order to battle with other men for desirable women. Emotional skills that might lead to long-term relationships, in this view, have little role. Women, on the other hand, will pursue men who are more likely to stick around the morning after and help provide the food and protection mother and child will need to survive.
Sounds a lot like gender stereotypes today: a species of aggressive philandering men and nurturing, monogamous women. (Much cited research to bolster this view by David Buss, Ph.D., a leader in this field at the University of Michigan, found that male college students who were offered the chance to sleep with a beautiful stranger that night, were more likely than their female counterparts to say yes.)
The situation may vary among cultures but, says Geary, culture will never change the fact that men can potentially reproduce more frequently than women. "It will always lead to some level of conflict of interest between men and women. Women want men to invest in their kids and them, and by doing so, men lose the opportunity to have multiple mates." And, he adds, there is no culture in which there is equality between men and women in childcare. "Women," he adds, "hate to hear that."
He's right. Women do hate to hear that. Not only women of the general public, but women researchers as well. Riled psychologists, many of them women, sat up in alarm when the evolutionary psychology theories started snowballing in academic journals and in the popular press as well. Articles appeared, television shows hosted EP spokespersons. Social conservatives started using the "biological" evidence of gender differences to claim validity for the women-as-natural-homemaker model of society.
Upsetting to critics of EP theories is the suggestion, popularized in the press, that what is biological is unchangeable. "One of my objections to evolutionary psychology," explains Mary Gergen, Ph.D., professor of psychology and women's studies at Pennsylvania State University-Delaware County and a hard-core believer that gender is primarily a social construct, "is that it tends to stabilize and justify existing patterns of social relationships. They say they are presenting 'just the facts ma'am,' but it justifies the status quo."
Certainly, the idea put forth by evolutionary psychologists about the origins of gender differences is a conservative take on the matter. Conservative in the old sense of the word: inclined to preserve existing conditions and to resist change. Conservative, too, in the political sense of the word, as these debates quickly descend from the ivory tower and onto the ground, where policy is determined and intimate relationships are worked out. It's a position that offers an in-your-face challenge to feminists and other women activists who have tried to move American society in the direction of the egalitarian ideal, bolstered by the philosophical perspective that human psychology is eminently mutable.
Researchers, a good number of them self-identified feminists, who had been happily testing sex differences, suddenly felt called to action not only to "put out fires," as one said, but to come up with alternative solutions to the question of origins.
"I started to address [the origins question] because it was being addressed very directly by evolutionary psychologists," explains Mice Eagly, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Northwestern University who had been working on questions of sex differences for 20 years. To her, their explorations of evolution were becoming "imperial," suggesting that all sex differences had biological basis.
All of these researchers agree on some theoretical basics: the nature-versus-nurture debate is moot; the differences between men and women are the result of humanity moving through the environment. Even EPs, though they believe change is slow, agree that "evolution," as Geary explains, "does not lead to a fixed point. Women harassing their men [over childcare] will lead to more investment in their children. There's some kind of wiggle-room."
"This is more than wiggle room," Eagly insists, and it's there that the battles begin. "Yes, there is a lot of sexual selection for the biological side of things," agrees Janice Juraskca, Ph.D., professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, "but one of the things that got selected that these guys [EPs] often forget is a flexible human brain." It's the flexibility question that's key, and it's on that question--a question that has major political and personal implications--that all battle-lines between the girls and the guys are drawn.
Eagly and a former student, Wendy Wood, Ph.D., now a professor at the Texas A&M University, have been working together to offer an alternative, what they call their "bio-social" model. Their work spans the fields of psychology, investigating hormones, cultural bias and other cross-cultural and cross-species evidence to determine what they consider a more complex understanding of gender differences.
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