Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong—and the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

by Angela Saini

When Scelza started doing fieldwork with the Himba in 2010, women would ask her why she didn’t have men coming to her hut. “Well, I said, ‘You know, I’m married.’ And they said, ‘Yeah, yeah, but that doesn’t matter. He’s not here.’ So then I tried to explain that my marriage was a love match, because then I thought they would understand. And they said, ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s okay, it’s okay. He’s not going to know; it’s okay,’” she recalls. “They really hold a very different idea in their heads about love and sex, that it wouldn’t be a bad thing at all for me to say, on the one hand, that I really love my husband but that I’ll still be having sex with somebody else when we’re apart. That, to them, was not a transgression.”

Reasons why I think affair is not the right word: it implies that it's considered a large transgression.

The Mosuo of China, one of the few societies in the world in which women head households and property is passed down the female line, people practice what is known as “walking marriage.” This allows a woman to have as many sexual partners as she likes. The lover of her choice simply comes to her room at night and leaves the next morning. What marks the Mosuo apart is that men traditionally don’t provide much economic or social support to their children.

Baranowski and Hecht suspected that women might reasonably be put off having sex with a stranger for lots of good reasons, including the social stigma of getting picked up so casually and, more obvious, the risk that they might be attacked. “We wanted to find out how the original findings would stand up to a more naturalistic setting, such as a cocktail bar, and a more safe setting, namely a laboratory,” they wrote in their paper, published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2015. They wanted to make sure they didn’t veer too far from the original experiment either, so they ran it on a university campus as well. Both on the campus and in the cocktail bar, they got fairly similar results to Clark and Hatfield, with slightly more men than women agreeing to a date, and many more men agreeing to sex. In both cases, though, men weren’t nearly as keen to go on dates or have sex compared to the Florida State University experiment. It wasn’t proof that Clark and Hatfield had got it wrong, but it was certainly evidence that different places and times can yield different results.

Doing that study post-AIDS makes a big difference

the researchers concocted an elaborate ruse based on a dating study. Each person was shown ten photographs of strangers of the opposite sex and told that all these strangers wanted to go on a date or meet up for sex with the subject in particular. If they agreed to meet, they were given a safe environment, and Baranowski and Hecht’s research team would then film the first half of their encounter. All the men in the study agreed to go on a date and also have sex with at least one of the women in the photographs. For women, the figure was 97 percent agreeing to a date and, unlike the first experiment, “almost all women agreed to have sex,” says Baranowski. It was evidence, they noted in their paper, that gender differences are significantly smaller in a nonthreatening environment.

This is a much better study design

Investigating further, Gowaty soon began to notice problems with Bateman’s study. In a subsequent paper, published in 2012 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Gowaty and researchers Yong-Kyu Kim and Wyatt Anderson at the University of Georgia, wrote, “Bateman’s method overestimated subjects with zero mates, underestimated subjects with one or more mates, and produced systematically biased estimates of offspring number by sex.” They claim that Bateman counted mothers as parents less often than fathers, which is a biological impossibility, since it takes two to make a baby.

When I e-mail Don Symons, who wrote The Evolution of Human Sexuality in 1979, to ask his opinion on Gowaty’s failure to replicate Bateman’s findings, he tells me he hasn’t read her paper. When I ask instead for his broader thoughts on the evidence of multiple mating in females, he tells me that he’s no longer available to answer my questions for personal reasons. I also ask Robert Trivers, who first popularized Bateman’s paper in 1972, for his response. “I was afraid you were going to ask that,” he tells me over the phone from Jamaica. “I have not read the God Jesus paper.” He agrees to look at it for me, but doesn’t get around to reading it thoroughly even after a few weeks. “Since Patty is a careful scientist my bias is that she is correct,” he finally tells me by e-mail. Even so, he adds that research on other species (including his research on a Jamaican giant lizard) has reinforced Bateman’s principles.

Personal reasons lmao. Trivers is saying "But I'm still not wrong"

The principles can’t be considered principles if there are so many exceptions. The problem is that Bateman’s and Trivers’s ideas have taken on such a life of their own that this no longer appears to make much difference.

“When a paper like that comes out, you would think that people who are interested in the topic would read it, regardless of which side they’re interested in or which side they tend to agree with. I try to read papers by people who don’t agree with my position. And I can’t imagine just saying, ‘Oh, I didn’t bother to read it.’ That to me seems almost insulting to a fellow scientist, to take that attitude.”

As a student, Trivers would sometimes work until three in the morning. “So at one thirty, I would hear some ‘woo hoo-hoo,’ and I would see, ha ha! What happened is the male has fallen asleep and the female has crept back down to the comfortable position, which is how she would prefer to sleep the night. He wakes up and sees she is there, and pecks her back up into this uncomfortable position!” he says. “The sexual insecurity or the risk of an extra-pair copulation is strong enough to make me willing to inflict a cost on my mate.”

Trivers is not making himself look like a good partner lol. Also, single beds are impossible to be comfortable for two people at once unless they are throughly wrapped around each other so it just makes sense for people to attempt to get comfortable at the expense of their bedmate

For Trivers, this is powerful evidence of intense male competition for females. But seen from a different point of view, it also casts the underlying assumptions of Charles Darwin and Angus Bateman in an alternative light. Male sexual jealousy, the fear of being cuckolded, and such vicious mate guarding suggest that females aren’t naturally chaste or passive at all. If they were, then why would their partners go to such extraordinary lengths to stop them getting anywhere near other males?

The mutilation itself can take many horrifying forms. But the most common cuts fall into three categories. The first is the partial or total removal of the clitoris. The second includes this, plus the partial or total removal of the smaller, inner folds on either side of the vaginal opening. The third is the wholesale narrowing of the vagina’s entrance by cutting and sealing the folds on either side, like a pair of lips being hacked and sewn shut. This final type, known as “infibulation,” is often the most damaging of the three, leaving women with only a tiny gap through which to pee and pass menstrual fluid. It can be so small that they sometimes have to be cut open before they can have sex or give birth.

The cut was cruel enough, but she would also suffer recurrent urinary infections and scarring. The flashbacks would haunt her forever. An entire decade would pass before she finally understood the point of it all. She never stopped asking her mother why she had allowed her to be cut. When she was sixteen, she was told that it was to put her off having sex before marriage.

One young man admitted to her that he couldn’t bring himself to sleep with his wife on their wedding night because she had undergone infibulation and he was scared of hurting her. If men would accept brides who weren’t mutilated, she notes, the stigma might go away. Yet, however damaging it might be to their wives and their marriages, few men stand up against the practice. And the reason for this is simple. The torture continues because it does what it was always intended to do. A woman who has been cut as a child will almost certainly remain a virgin when she’s older. It would be too painful for her to be anything else.

In Cameroon and some parts of West Africa, girls between the ages of eight and twelve today suffer a procedure, often at the hands of their mothers, known as breast “ironing.” A grinding stone, broom, belt, or another object is heated, then used to press a girl’s budding breasts flat. The goal is to keep her looking like a child for as long as possible, so people assume she hasn’t yet entered puberty. Aside from the psychological impact and immediate pain, breast ironing can cause long-term medical problems including scarring and difficulty breast-feeding, according to Rebecca Tapscott, who documented the practice for the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University in 2012.

That sounds like it's a misguided attempt to make the child a less likely target of men's sexual attention?

Although this takes repression to an extreme, the expectation of female modesty runs through many major religions. The hijab and burka worn by some Muslim women are demonstrations of this. The orthodox Jewish concept of tzniut similarly requires both sexes to cover up their bodies, but for married women in particular to cover their hair.

I wish Saini had interviewed hijabis and frum women about why they choose to cover themselves. It is never assumed that Catholic nuns wear the habit because it's forced on them. Modest dress is something that can be someone's non coerced choice.

Don Symons, the anthropologist who has argued that the female orgasm didn’t evolve for a purpose and that females have no biological reason to want more than one mate, was especially unimpressed. Sherfey’s “sexually insatiable woman is to be found primarily, if not exclusively, in the ideology of feminism, the hopes of boys, and the fears of men,” he wrote.

Okay then explain medieval European thought that women were hot blooded and need to be sexually restrained

In the nineteenth century, the German philosopher, journalist, and socialist Friedrich Engels, who famously collaborated with Karl Marx, had already drawn connections between the economic and political dominance of men and their control of female sexuality. He described it dramatically as “the world historical defeat of the female sex.” He went on, “The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children.”

“Women’s sexual subordination was institutionalised in the earliest law codes and enforced by the full power of the state,” concluded Lerner. This included wearing the veil. Married, respectable women in the Assyrian empire in northern Mesopotamia, which existed until around 600 BC, were expected to cover their heads in public. Slave girls and prostitutes, on the other hand, were forbidden from wearing veils. If they broke this rule, they faced physical punishment.

Slave women being punished for wearing the veil is important to note bc it shows the veil is something only women of status could wear

“In bonobos it’s very important for males to have their mothers with them for life,” explains Parish. “We have this pejorative idea that when males are especially close to their mothers, that they’re momma’s boys and that’s a bad thing. But in this case, unlike chimps—where males separate really clearly from their mothers at adolescence in order to join the male dominance hierarchy—in bonobos, males maintain their relationship with their mother for life. She intervenes in his fights, protects him from violence; he gets to mate with her friends; he gets access to otherwise exclusive female feeding circles. So there’s a really big upside for males.”

“For forty years, the chimpanzee researchers had the corner of the market on man’s closest living relative,” explains Parish. “We built all our models of evolution based on a chimp model: patriarchal, hunting, meat eating, male bonding, male aggression toward females, infanticide, sexual coercion.” Bonobos turn this all on its head.

“Despite the frequency of sex, the bonobos rate of reproduction in the wild is about the same as that of the chimpanzee. A female gives birth to a single infant at intervals of between five and six years. So bonobos share at least one very important characteristic with our own species, namely, a partial separation between sex and reproduction.”

But is it possible that somewhere in our evolutionary history we were matriarchal like bonobos appear to be? For primatologist Amy Parish, the existence of a primate species in which females tend to dominate is hugely important, if only because it opens the debate.

The focus on dominance in primate behavior makes it easy to forget that there are also species out there in which the sexes coexist and cooperate relatively peacefully. Pair-bonded tamarins and titi monkeys, for instance, share child care between males and females. Titi monkeys don’t seem to have any kind of dominance hierarchy. In other monogamous species, such as gibbons and simiangs, male coercion of females is hardly seen.

A common mistake is to assume that males naturally dominate because they’re larger. And this makes intuitive sense. If any one sex can take control, isn’t it likely to be the one with the physical advantage? But this isn’t true. Gibbons of both sexes look similar, for example, but the males tend to be very slightly larger and don’t coerce females.

The common thread that unites species in which females are particularly vulnerable to male violence is females being alone.

In patriarchal societies, a woman will almost always leave her own family when she gets married and go live with her husband’s. Losing the support of her relatives makes her especially weak in the face of violence and repression. And this weakness is exacerbated when men form alliances with each other and control resources, such as food and property. In the end, this is where the die seems to fall when it comes to male dominance over females. Female cooperation makes the difference. This doesn’t answer the question of whether male domination was always the biological norm for our species, the way it is for chimpanzees, but it does offer a perspective on the battle for equality today.

Some cases were documented with medical fascination. One doctor described a forty-nine-year-old woman who believes she’s decaying. She eventually commits suicide. Another, age fifty, complains that she’s no longer a human being, with no stomach, heart, or lungs. A forty-six-year-old wife, meanwhile, develops the habit of stripping naked and demanding sex.

Life in the asylum wasn’t easy. A woman arriving at Bedlam between 1676 and 1815 would have been welcomed by two imposing stone statues flanking the entrance. They represented the two categories into which most mental patients were thought to fall. The first figure was Raving, desperately struggling against hospital chains, his face contorted with agony. The second, Melancholy, was unrestrained but disturbingly unengaged, as though the outside world had lost all meaning. Of the women admitted to Bethlem Hospital for menopause-associated mental illness, only up to half recovered, according to data in 1912.

the follicular depletion hypothesis, which, like the extended longevity hypothesis, says that women nowadays outlive their eggs. The problem with this is that you might then expect women with more children to go through menopause later, because they’re not menstruating while pregnant. They don’t.

“When you add helpful grandmothering, at the beginning, almost nobody is living past their fertility,” explains Hawkes. “And yet just those few, those few who are still around at the end of their fertility, that’s enough for selection to begin to shift the life history from an apelike one to a humanlike one. We end up with something that looks like just what we see in modern hunter-gatherers.” All it would have taken in those early days of human evolutionary history was a few good grandmothers.

Indeed, Singh, Morton, and Stone’s hypothesis has been mocked in scientific circles. “It makes very little sense. Chimps actually prefer older females as their mates,” Virpi Lummaa, at the University of Sheffield, tells me. Another prominent researcher in the field, Rebecca Sear, at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, agrees. “It’s a stupid argument and it was trashed when it came out. It’s a circular explanation. The reason men don’t prefer postmenopausal women is that they’re postmenopausal and they can’t get pregnant, not the other way round.”

But there are other explanations. “Part of it may lie in the sex of the researcher,” Crittenden admits. “Science is supposed to be objective,” but it’s possible that their sex affected how they collected their data, she adds. Hawkes and Marlowe now have their own scientific camps, each with their own versions of the past, one favoring powerful old men and the other favoring grandmothers. “The one I’m betting on really does make grandmothering the key to this special characteristic of our longevity,” states Hawkes. For the patriarch hypothesis to work, she explains, there would have to be at least a few old men alive in the beginning to make these patriarchies happen in the first place, and the fact that our primate cousins don’t have any elderly chimps or apes among them raises the question of where on earth these older men might have come from in large enough numbers.

Gurven is on the softer end of opposition to the grandmother hypothesis. Marlowe, Morton, Stone, and Singh have been on the harder end. But the trend here isn’t difficult to spot: countertheories to the grandmother hypothesis appear to come mainly from men.

But he also believes that Kristen Hawkes has fought too hard for the grandmother hypothesis, even neglecting critiques of her evidence. It survives, he says, because it is sexy, not because it is right. “By throwing men under the bus, it seemed to be a radical new idea and people clung to that,” he tells me. Donna Holmes, an expert on the biology of aging based at the University of Idaho, agrees with Gurven on this point. She tells me that she has clashed with Hawkes over the grandmother hypothesis, and that she’s still not convinced by it. “It was provocative and fresh. It made feminists happy,

I love it when people criticize ideas in ways that imply that marginalized people have vastly more power than they actually do. It's very transparent

As I learned later, this wasn’t Montagu’s only controversial piece of work. He was a prolific author who had lectured at Princeton and became something of an intellectual celebrity in the postwar years, appearing on American chat shows. When Hitler was committing atrocities against Jews in Europe, he wrote about the fallacy of the biological idea of race. In his writings on women, he compared their subjugation to the historic treatment of black people in the United States.

Montagu looks at the biological measures by which we assume women are inferior to men. He uses data to show that, intellectually and physically, women aren’t weak and feeble. And he makes a passionate case for improving the status of women.

He calls for flexible working patterns, in which parents can split child care evenly between them so both can enjoy the benefits of raising their kids. He asks husbands not to leave housework to stay-at-home wives, however much they dislike it.

When Konner’s book was serialized in the Wall Street Journal, within forty-eight hours he had more than seven hundred comments, many of them from a “men’s rights movement.” “There were some comments that were brief, but started and ended with ‘fuck you,’” he recalls. Another told him, “There’s no describing your kind of stupid.” The response came as a shock. His wife had to double lock their doors. The idea of women gaining power, Konner admits, “is threatening” to some. That shouldn’t really surprise us. When suffragists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fought for the right to vote, they faced enormous opposition. It was a bitter, bloody battle. Thousands were imprisoned and some were tortured. Every wave for change in women’s lives has brought with it the same kind of resistance.

The world may seem better for women than it was in 1952, when Ashley Montagu wrote The Natural Superiority of Women, but in some ways it’s worse. Resistance from certain corners is so powerfully toxic that it threatens to overturn the progress that’s been made. You may think these struggles have nothing to do with the lofty world of science. Academics often balk at the thought of mixing their work with politics. But when it comes to women, there’s no avoiding it. Without taking into account how deeply unfair science has been to women in the past (and in some quarters, still is), it’s impossible to be fairer in the future. And this is important for all of us. Because what science tells us about women profoundly shapes how society thinks about the sexes.