Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution

by Cat Bohannon

think of sexism and gynecology as two sides of the same coin: they’re two behavioral strategies our species employed—and still employs—to try to jury-rig a glitchy system. If pregnancies are dangerous and babies are needy, you need work-arounds. For example, birth spacing to control how often the girls in your troop are pregnant. Gynecology gives you tools for birth control and abortion. But you can also create cultural rules around when and where the males get access to female bodies, and then create punishments for those who break the rules. That’s the core of what sexism is: a massive set of rules that work to control reproduction. The aspects shift from place to place, but every single human culture has rules about what women should wear, where they can go and in what circumstances, whom they should talk to and when, and most certainly when and how and with whom they should have sex.