Are Things Feminine?
An armchair journey through our evolutionary history
Due to female biology, self-sufficiency is an inherently feminine trait. Women have significantly less raw physical power than men. It’s kinda stupid, and definitely unfair, how much less. In addition to the baseline difference, women were additionally incapacitated for a significant portion of their adult lives via pregnancy and childbirth. These differences mean that women were much less able to gain resources through theft or conquest, and had to produce everything themselves.
In the pre-modern world, there was no social contract, police force, or court to enforce property laws. People owned only what they could protect. And for women, that was not much. Any woman who amassed significant resources was in immediately danger of having those resources taken by the first man who passed by. Even if she had a man to protect her, men were constantly out hunting or foraging, leaving women at home and vulnerable. In the eternal game of “makers and takers,” evolution optimized men to be takers and women to be makers. Men can be productive, of course, and many are. But in the ancestral environment, men had the option not to produce anything and instead appropriate resources produced by others. One of the most masculine societies in history sustained itself almost entirely through theft. That was not an option open to women.
Women are built for ongoing productivity. While men had the option to amass wealth created by others and live off of it, women’s strategy, by necessity, focused on continuous production. When you have no option to hoard resources, you’re forced to produce what you need and consume it immediately to minimize the chances of anyone else taking it. Even women’s biology is built to be productive. During pregnancy, women produce a placenta to feed their unborn child that is literally kept inside their body where nobody can get to it, then expelled as soon as it’s not needed. After pregnancy, women continuously produce extremely nutritious milk - a very valuable resource - to be fed to their children every few hours. Ignoring this biological imperative is painful and can be dangerous. Women’s bodies literally force them to be productive.
Culture is downstream of environment and biology. It is a feminine virtue to be self-sufficient and continually produce resources. Men can have value by amassing large fortunes, which is why 85% of the world’ richest people are men. We naturally respect these men, due to the realities of biology. Rich women don’t get a similar level of respect. Can you name the richest woman in the world? I can’t. But I bet you can name a good handful of the ten richest men.
This has observable consequences. Women absolutely dominate service industry jobs (despite being substantially less than half of the labor force) - the type of jobs where products are created continuously. Finance - a field that creates nothing but merely appropriates wealth created by others - is overwhelmingly male.
This extends to the personal. Women find men attractive when they’ve gathered large amounts of resources, regardless of how they did it. In fact, historically, the most attractive thing was for a man to inherit his wealth without producing anything. Men can be successful and loved even when entirely dependent on the produce of others, because that is not where their social and cultural value lies. By contrast, men find women attractive when they are highly educated and accomplished, showing that they can be productive and self-sufficient.
Could we destroy all this and flatten the sexes? The practical differences are lesser in the modern day. We now have police, courts, and a social contract that means women can hoard wealth and don’t need to continually produce. There are far fewer roving bands of ruffians who will steal everything you have if you can’t physically defend it. Resources can be stored in banks and locked homes where they are largely safe to keep.
And yet the instincts remain. We’ve been programmed by millennia of evolution to demand competence from women. It remains the case that almost any man can overpower almost woman and take whatever property she has with her.
For a woman to be productive is beautiful. To learn skills in the service of this work is noble. The pursuit of these ideals makes the world a more beautiful and romantic place. Lives filled with striving after virtues are richer.
[Evo]Psych!
If you haven’t noticed by now, the above section was complete horseshit, and written as a parody of my best friend Eneasz’s defense of gender normativity. It’s meant to illustrate that a sufficiently motivated person can invent an evolutionary story to explain anything. And hey, it’s plausible! Why do men prefer highly educated women? Why is it considered so high status for a man to live off his inheritance? How did women in the ancestral environment defend their resources? Nobody knows! So we’re free to make up any dumb story we want! After all, everything about how our brains work must have had an evolutionary advantage at some point, so there’s got to be an explanation for everything.
My most fervent hope, reader, is that you’ll think of this essay next time someone tries to explain gendered behavior with references to “the ancestral environment” or “evolutionary programming” or other such foolishness, and you’ll recognize it for what it is - a work of fiction.