Sexism: Massive Rules to Control Reproduction

The Evolution of Sexism¹

Cat Bohannon, author of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, says sexism is a massive set of rules all cultures have to control female reproduction.For Bohannon, sex rules became a part of how human beings built modern culture. She reminds us that what we think of as culture today is a complex system of individuals making often unconscious decisions that, over many thousands of years, become ingrained in local identities. Every human being, each one of us, is an active agent in the generation and maintenance of our culture. As she says, we are all sexist—we enforce rules about sex!

Evolutionarily, we are wired to care about sex and about social norms… it’s in our DNA. For evolutionary theorists, it’s all about the evolution from our early primates to human patriarchies. In patriarchies, females get male protection, and males get to establish paternity. Hence the need for strict rules about women’s reproduction.

There are rules about how she should act, such as:

• What she should wear
• Where and when she can go, and in what circumstances
• Whom she should talk to, and when
• When and how she should have sex

There are also rules that manage a woman’s time, which can determine when men have access to her body. There are rules that:

• Can keep her out of the workplace
• Can determine when and where she can be in public places
• Can determine how many hours she should spend with her children

While there are rules about sex for men, there aren’t as many, and they are not enforced as rigidly. The reason is that we are mammals—our babies are made in the womb, and females are the ones with wombs. Human beings care a lot about sex, especially when it comes to women.

“Does Sexism Help Us the Way It Used To?” ²

For our ancestors, social rules about reproduction were about how to get the right number of babies at the right time, raised in the way that worked given the resources available to them. But Bohannon’s thesis is that sexism, as practiced in the wide array of different cultures, is starting to hurt our species. She argues that from a biological perspective, sexism is making us less healthy, wealthy, and wise.

Sexism Is Making Us Less Healthy

Sexist rules should keep sexually active people healthy. Instead, such rules are accelerating the spread of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), driving an increase in maternal deaths, and inhibiting the advance of gynecology.

Accelerating STIs: Female chastity is a common sex rule. “Good” women aren’t supposed to have multiple partners, which is supposed to decrease STIs and make establishing paternity possible. Female chastity should protect us from gonorrhea, syphilis, HIV, chlamydia, herpes, and genital warts. These STIs can decrease fertility, thereby affecting evolutionary fitness. But women have never, across history, been “chaste”: i.e., had sex with only one man. And men don’t have sex with one woman. Actually, men in “chaste women” cultures are encouraged to have sex with multiple partners, often as a measure of manliness.

STIs decrease consistently in cultures where we are taught to use condoms, and they are cheaply available. In America, many promiscuous people are better at practicing safe sex. However, if the chastity rule is in place, the non-promiscuous don’t use condoms because they are safe. However, a “safe” partner may have acquired an infection from a prior partner, pass it on to the next “averagely” promiscuous partner, and so on.

The result, Bohannon tells us, is that “… it’s relatively ‘chaste,’ modest, serially monogamous women who are driving massive outbreaks of STIs in places with cultures that promote a range of female chastity and masculine promiscuity.” ³ It’s women more than men who are more likely to acquire a range of STIs. Mucous membranes are more vulnerable to infection than outer skin.

Sexism makes us less wealthy⁴

Bohannon notes that human wealth is one of the best predictors that a child will reach adulthood successfully. Research in rural America and India demonstrates that the easiest, cheapest, and most reliable way to see that a community’s wealth increases is to invest in its women and girls. This research shows that when women are given financial control over money and the independence to allocate it, they invest it in their immediate household and community.

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In America and Europe, women politicians are more likely to support spending that directly affects the public welfare. Bohannon notes that economists have written that if you give women more money and the power to make decisions about it, their communities will generally become more economically productive. She chides us that we don’t have to care about women’s “rights” to see that financially supporting women is advisable economically.

Sexism makes us less wise⁵

Bohannon notes that from a biological point of view, being smart likely helps us stay alive. It helps us make good decisions, form deep relationships, contribute to our communities, and keep our kids safe. Sexism can compromise the cognitive development of both girls and boys. And this is not about education; it’s about food. She reminds us that the human brain is built out of food. The sugar, protein, and fat the fetus uses to build its brain come directly from the mother’s body.

In India, young women and brides typically eat last at meals. In the Indian state of Maharashtra, where Mumbai is located, the cultural rule is that guests eat first, followed in order by oldest man, younger men, older women, and then the children. It is a general tradition in India that a younger woman eats only after everyone else—the same rule applies to pregnant women.

While Bohannon does not think of women only as baby-makers, she tells us that if we want lots of our kids to be smart, women have:

• To be well-fed for at least two decades before pregnancy
• To be well cared for throughout their reproductive life
• To be educated about nutrition, healthy habits, and newborn caretaking

As Bohannon says, “…screwing around with women’s food and reproductive health tends to make everyone in the local culture a bit less intelligent.” ⁶

Gynecology Is the Most Impressive Human Invention⁷

Bohannon sees gynecology, which she thinks is the most impressive human invention, as the alternative to the massive sex rules that have evolved to manage sexual reproduction. She defines gynecology as the continually evolving body of medical knowledge and practices that is used in every single contemporary human culture as well as every known historical culture. For Bohannon, all human gynecological practices have some basic things in common:

• To try to prevent and treat excessive uterine bleeding
• To try to prevent and treat bacterial infections
• To guide the intensity of the mother’s labor to coincide with the dilation of her cervix

In most cultures, historical and current, a variety of devices, both mechanical and pharmacological, have been developed to enhance or prevent pregnancy, i.e., to manage sexual reproduction. For Bohannon, these gynecological practices were what enabled the ancient human species to create enough of a population to migrate across most of the planet successfully.

Gynecology Evolved From Midwifery

Bohannon asserts that the arrival of midwives is when we started to become human. The evolutionary precursor for our ancestors was letting someone help them give birth. For midwifery to become widespread, collaboration between members of a social group would have opted for cooperation over competition.

Our female ancestors needed to be able to trust other female members enough to let them help at such a vulnerable time—when they were in labor, giving birth and early nursing. The practice of midwifery can be traced to the paleolithic era where pregnancy and childbirth pregnancy often occurred in life-threatening environments.⁸ Midwifery, in our current era, was a common and unregulated practice up until the mid-1800s when male physicians opposed midwife-assisted births. They launched campaigns against midwifery and began the move toward births being managed by the medical profession.

Gynecology as the Alternative to Sexism

Bohannon has taught us that sex rules are built into our cultural identity, and they are used to help us survive. And she has shown us that gynecology, a uniquely human invention, can be an alternative to sexism. She notes that feminism is the history of the tension between individual female reproductive choices and collective strategies to manage sexual reproduction. Bohannon has some guidelines for how to choose between individual reproductive freedom and collective strategies like sexism:

• Become more deliberate about the choices we make around sex rules.
• Create social institutions that combat the negative effects of sexism.
• Reinforce egalitarianism.
• Support and defend the advancement of gynecology.

Bohannon believes that if we continue to move toward egalitarianism between the sexes, supported by better and better gynecological medicine, we can take control of our reproductive systems. By doing so, we can escape our evolutionary destiny. We can do this by being human: being smart, collaborative problem solvers.