The Queen - Matt Ridley

If in the Pleistocene period men went off from the home base on long hunts while women went a shorter distance to gather plants, then maybe men are mentally better suited to long commutes. But neither is evolutionarily suited to sit at a desk all day and talk into a telephone or sit at a factory bench all day tightening screws: The fact that " work" became a male thing and "home " a female one is an accident of history: The domestication of cattle and the invention of the plow made food gathering a task that benefited from male muscle power: In societies: where the land is tilled by hand, women do most of the work: The industrial revolution reinforced the trend, but the post industrial revolution—the recent growth of service industries—is reversing it again: Women are going " out to work" again as they did when they sought tubers and berries in the Pleistocene period."

Therefore, there is absolutely no justification from evolutionary biology for the view that men should earn and women should darn their socks. There may be professions, such as car mechanic or big-game hunter, that men are psychologically more suited to than women, just as there are professions, such as doctor and nanny, that women are probably naturally better at: But there is no general support in biology for sexism about careers: Indeed, in a curious way, an evolutionary perspective justifies affirmative action more than a more egalitarian philosophy would, for it implies that women have different ambitions and even more than different abilities. Men's reproductive success depended for generations on climbing political hierarchies. Women have rarely had an incentive to seek success of that kind, for their reproductive success depended on other things. Therefore, evolutionary thinking predicts that women often will not seek to climb political SEXING THE MIND

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ladders, but it says nothing about how good they would be if they did: I suggest it is no accident that women have reached the top rung (as the prime minister in many countries) in numbers dispro-portionate to their strength on the lower rungs. I suggest that it is no accident that queens of Britain have a far more distinguished and consistent history than the kings. The evidence suggests that women are on average slightly better than men at running countries. The evidence supports the feminist assertion that men can only envy the female touches they bring to such jobs—intuition, character judgment, lack of self-worship. Since the bane of all organizations, whether they are companies, charities, or governments, is that they reward cunning ambition rather than ability (the people who are good at getting to the top are not necessarily the people who are best at doing the job) and since men are more endowed with such ambition than women, it is absolutely right that promotion should be biased in favor of women—not to redress prejudice but to redress human nature.

And also, of course, to represent the woman 's point of view.

Feminists believe that women need to be proportionally represented in Parliament and Congress because women have a different agenda.

They are right if women are by nature different. If they were the same as men, there would be no reason for men not to represent women 's interests as competently as they represent men ' s. To believe in sexual equality is just. To believe in sexual identity is a most peculiar and unfeminist thing to do.

Feminists who recognize this contradiction are pilloried for their pains. Camille Paglia, literary critic and gadfly, is one of the few who sees that feminism is trying an impossible trick: to change the nature of men while insisting that the nature of women is unchangeable. She argues that men are not closet women and women are not 2

closet men: "Wake up," she cries. "Men and women are different."

THE CAUSES OF MALE HOMOSEXUALITY

A man develops a sexual preference for women because his brain develops in acertain way. It develops in a certain way because

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The Red Queen

testosterone produced•by his genetically determined testicles alter the brain inside his mother 's womb in such a way that later, at puberty, it will react to testosterone again: Miss out on the genes for testicles, the testosterone burst in the womb, or the testosterone burst at puberty—any one of the three—and you will not be a typical man: Presumably, a man who develops a preference for other men is a man who has a different gene that affects how his testicles develop or a different gene that affects how his brain responds to hormones or a different learning experience during the pubertal burst of testosterone—or some combination of these: The search for the cause of homosexuality has begun to shed a great deal of light on the way the brain develops in response to testosterone. It was fashionable until the 1960s to believe that homosexuality was entirely a matter of upbringing: But cruel Freudian aversion therapy proved incapable of changing it, and the fashion then changed to hormonal explanations. Yet adding male hormones to the blood of gay men does not make them more heterosexual; it merely makes them more highly sexed. Sexual orientation has already been fixed before adulthood: Then, in the 1960s, an East German doctor named Gunter Dorner began a series of experiments on rats which seemed to show that in the womb the male homosexual brain releases a hormone, called ,luteinizing hormone, that is more typical of female brains. Dorner, whose motives have often been questioned on the grounds that he seemed to be searching for a way to "cure" homosexuality, castrated male rats at different stages of development and injected them with female hormones: The earlier the castration, the more likely the rat was to solicit sex from other male rats. Research in Britain, America, and Germany has all confirmed that a prenatal exposure to deficiency of testosterone increases the likelihood of a man becoming homosexual. Men with an extra X chromosome and men exposed in the womb to female hormones are more likely to be gay or effeminate, and effeminate boys do indeed grow up to be gay more often than other boys: Intriguingly, men who were conceived and born in periods of great stress, such as toward the end of World War II, are more often gay than men born at other times: (The stress hormone cor-SEXING THE MIND

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tisol is made from the same progenitor as testosterone; perhaps it uses up the raw material, leaving less to be made into testosterone.) The same is true of rats: Homosexual behavior is more common in rats whose mothers were stressed during pregnancy. The things that male brains are usually good at gay brains are often bad at, and vice versa. Gays are also more often left-handed than heterosexuals, which makes a sort of sense because handedness is affected by sex hormones during development, but it is also odd because left-handed people are supposed to be better at spatial tasks than right-handers. This only demonstrates how sketchy our knowledge still is of the relationship between genes, hormones, brains, and skills."

It is clear, however, that the cause of homosexuality lies in some unusual balance of hormonal influence in the womb but not later on, a fact that further supports the idea that the mentality of sexual preference is affected by prenatal sex hormones. This is not incompatible with the growing evidence that homosexuality is genetically determined: The "gay gene " that I will discuss in the next chapter is widely expected to turn out to be a series of genes that affect the sensitivity of certain tissues to testosterone.27 It is both nature and nurture:

It is no different from genes for height: Fed on identical diets, two genetically different men will not grow to the same height: Fed on different diets, two identical twins will grow to different heights. Nature is the length of the rectangle, nurture the width. There can be no rectangle without both: The genes for height are really only genes for responding to diet by growing. i8