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

by Cat Bohannon

Every year, roughly sixty-two million people are infected with gonorrhea. It’s burning across America like a brush fire, frying the fallopian tubes in its path.

the sexist cultures that produce child marriage—places like Niger, Chad, Bangladesh, and Nepal[*41]—are also the ones that kill the most girls, if for no other reason than that they force girls to marry and have sex with older men before their bodies are developed enough to be able to survive it.

Obviously, this isn’t sustainable on an evolutionary scale: no behavioral group that deliberately injures young females would be able to survive and thrive in the long run. That such practices are seen as “ancient” is only evidence of humanity’s myopia. Sure, once upon a time, child marriage was also fairly normal in places such as China and Europe, but we’re talking only a few hundred years ago, and since then it’s fallen out of favor. Ancient Greece aimed closer to sixteen, as did ancient China, while the age of marriage in ancient Rome ranged from fourteen to twenty. What’s more, in Rome the younger brides were often wealthy and married off as a matter of political exchange; the plebes generally married in their late teens or early twenties. The same was true of China and Greece.

So why, exactly, is the maternal death rate going up in the United States? In the last ten years, pregnant women and new mothers are dying in the United States more than they used to. That’s a direct reversal of the general trends of the last two centuries; normally, rich places have fewer dead mothers every year, not more. But a hot combination of racism, sexism, ableism, reduced public support for female health, and the crippling of science-based sex education has finally made it more dangerous for American women to be pregnant than it used to be.[*43]

As much as sexist cultures seem to want women to be pregnant more often, they also have a habit of reducing the health care available to pregnant women. Where are most pregnant American women dying? Poor communities, yes, but particularly poor communities in Texas, the American South, and Minnesota. These are all places where women’s access to health care and health education has been dramatically reduced in recent years through antiabortion campaigns, abstinence-only education policies, and a simultaneous series of cuts to publicly funded health clinics.

the easiest, cheapest, and most reliable way to increase a community’s wealth is to invest in its women and girls. As counterintuitive as it may seem, financially supporting females usually makes the entire community richer—richer, even, than giving the same amount of money to males in the same community.

When given the opportunity, women are more likely to spend a family’s money on food and clothing and health care and children’s education. Men, meanwhile, are more likely to spend it on entertainment and on weapons and—if we’re talking global trends—on gambling or the local equivalents.[*47]

Worldwide, girls and women spend up to 90 percent of their earned income on their families. Men and boys spend only 30–40 percent.

One well-studied example is the history of Islam in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. By many measures, medieval Islamic societies were more gender equal than the Arab world today. In fact, the Prophet Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija—famously his most beloved—was older than him, twice widowed, already had children, and was a widely respected businesswoman when he met her.[*54] In the twelfth century, the Islamic philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes) wrote that women should be considered equal to men in all respects, including education and opportunities for employment.

But it’s not just unforeseen large-scale disasters we have to deal with. There’s also the quintessential asshole. And not just the Hitlers, or Pol Pots, or Assads, or even the less overtly murderous types, like the Trumps. There’s the consistent problem of everyday assholes.