Verified by 
Many of the critics of my previous posts seem to assume that in saying that we should not turn to chimps for romantic models I'm saying that people are not animals. But this is not at all what I'm saying. I agree that people are animals. I just don't think that they are the same kinds of animals as chimps. People are animals who have constructed an incredibly complex cultural edifice - one that consists of art, music, science, politics, economics, educational systems, book stores, night clubs, websites, and television shows (among other things). This edifice has a tremendous impact on how we live our lives. This is why I think that pretending that romantic behavior boils down to a set of biological imperatives - such as the reproductive impulse - is far too simplistic. And more specifically, I take issue with our self-help industry's attempts to convince us that men and women are "wired" differently, and that to make romance work, women need to learn to interpret the so-called "male psyche." I think that this kind of thinking makes it impossible for us to appreciate the complexity of the person in front of us, reducing him or her to a hollow stereotype.
Gender differences exist, of course, but they are not nearly as pronounced as many self-help authors would like us to believe. And they do not necessarily arise from some sort of biological "wiring." When we first pop out of the womb, we don't have the foggiest idea of what gender means or how we are supposed to live our gendered lives? We learn this gradually through cultural processes of socialization that kick in the minute we enter the world. By the time we are adults, we have internalized our society's ideals of what it means to be a man or a woman so deeply that they have become an intrinsic part of our psychological makeup (what starts as the "outside" becomes the "inside," so to speak). They feel so viscerally "real" to us that it is very difficult for us to undo them. And it is difficult to accurately disentangle them from our biological constitution.
I don't deny that biology plays a part in human life. Of course it does. But I do question the "purity" of its impact. When I log onto this blog site and see a barrage of hate-soaked comments by folks who deliberately distort the message of a given post, my muscles tense up and I get a back-ache. This is a biological phenomenon, but it is socially generated: my body responds to the hostile social energies aimed at it. Likewise with gender. If I grow up in a society that constantly tells me that being a girl means this thing and being a boy means another, of course I'm going to respond to these messages on an absolutely fundamental level, particularly since I quickly realize that deviating from the script comes with a punishment. One reason this has always been crystal clear to me is that I've lived in several different cultures and know that in those cultures (the Nordic countries, for instance) where people pay little attention to gender, men and women are not that different. In contrast, in cultures, such as the North American one, which are invested in upholding clear lines of delineation between men and women, gender differences tend to be more pronounced.
The reason I resist deterministic biological models is that they make it all the more difficult for us to create a more flexible and egalitarian gender culture. I don't think that this type of rigidity is the goal of evolutionary biology as a science. But it seems to be the goal of many self-help authors who resort to a sham version of evolutionary biology to perpetuate ridiculously oppressive gender stereotypes (examples to follow in the next post). What I've been trying to do on this blog is to shatter our docility in the face of such efforts. I've attempted to alert us to the fact that there is something very strange about the overt celebration of gender profiling that is taking placed in our self-help culture at a moment in history when we are (rightly) doing our best to move away from other kinds of stereotypical thinking (about race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, socioeconomic class, etc.). By this I not mean to minimize the persistence of other kinds of prejudices (such as racism), for I am well aware of their equally hurtful impact. I'm simply saying that sexism is taking a very particular shape in our culture in the sense that it has become the status quo of our romantic self-help industry. And I'm saying that many of us take this status quo so much for granted that we don't even think to question it. This, I would say, is a social problem of sizable proportions.
