Inferior: The True Power of Women and the Science that Shows It

by Angela Saini

This implies that when parental investment changes, so might sexual behaviour. In monogamous species in which fathers are much more heavily involved in childcare, these rules could theoretically reverse.

The publication of Robert Trivers’ paper didn’t just mark a watershed in the way scientists understood sexual behaviour, but in how the everyday woman and man in the street understood it too. Sexual selection theory, revamped for the twentieth century, rapidly became a tool to explain women’s and men’s relationship habits. Bateman’s theories, once almost forgotten, were transformed into a fully-blown set of universal principles, cited hundreds of times and considered solid as a rock. On that rock now rests an entire field of work on sex differences.

One of Symons’ theories is that the female orgasm isn’t an evolutionary adaptation, but a by-product of the male orgasm, just as male nipples are a vestige of female nipples. If women do experience orgasm, he implies that it’s only a happy biological accident.

This idea popped up again in a 1998 New Yorker article by the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker. Under the title ‘Boys Will Be Boys’, he used evolutionary psychology to defend US president Bill Clinton, whose affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky had just been made public: ‘Most human drives have ancient Darwinian rationales. A prehistoric man who slept with fifty women could have sired fifty children, and would have been more likely to have descendants who shared his tastes. A woman who slept with fifty men would have no more descendants than a woman who slept with one.’

Men will sleep with strangers, while women simply won’t. But not everyone is convinced this is true.

In more distant species from us, researchers have found similar evidence of females mating with multiple males. Many birds that were thought to be monogamous have turned out not to be. Female bluebirds have been spotted flying considerable distances at night just to mate with other males. Data on the small-mouthed salamander, bush crickets, yellow-pine chipmunks, prairie dogs and mealworm beetles have shown that the females of all these species, too, enjoy more reproductive success when they mate with more males.

a paradigm shift is already under way. Scientific understanding of the breadth of female sexual nature has expanded to better encompass the true variety in the animal kingdom. Far from being passive, coy and monogamous, females of many species have been shown to be active, powerful and very willing to mate with more than one male.

In her own review of Don Symons’ book on human sexuality in 1979 she referred to their way of thinking as ‘a gentlemanly breeze from the nineteenth century’. She believes that, just as in Darwin’s time, scientists have twisted sexual selection theory in ways that are not just unfair to women, but unfair to the truth.

Although there’s no reason to think that Himba men and women don’t feel jealousy, says Scelza, the cultural norm among them is that it’s as acceptable for women to have affairs as it is for men, and husbands simply have to accept them. This profoundly challenges Angus Bateman’s theory that women aren’t eager for sex, and that they don’t want more than one sexual partner at a time.

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, practise 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 sets the Mosuo apart is that men traditionally don’t provide much economic or social support to their children. Similarly, in other small-scale societies where women contribute more to the family table, women tend to have more sexual freedom.

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 being picked up so casually and, more obviously, 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 got fairly similar results to Clark and Hatfield in each location, 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 to have sex as in the Florida experiment. This 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. It was also crucial in showing that there’s no one way in which the sexes typically behave.

Where Baranowski and Hecht’s data got really interesting was in the lab. They wanted their subjects to believe that they were being asked to go on genuine dates with real people, so they concocted an elaborate ruse based around a dating study. Each person was shown ten photographs of strangers of the opposite sex, and told that all of them wanted to go out on a date or meet up for sex with them in particular. If they agreed to meet, they then did so in a safe environment,

All the men in the study agreed to go on a date, and also to have sex, with at least one of the women in the photographs. For women, the figure was 97 per cent agreeing to a date, and unlike in the first experiment, ‘almost all women agreed to have sex’, says Baranowski.

She spent thirty years studying the mating behaviour of eastern bluebirds, and in the 1970s, when she suggested that female birds were flying away to mate with males that weren’t their partners, she simply wasn’t believed. Her male colleagues couldn’t accept it. They told her instead that the female bluebirds must have been raped.

after studying Bateman’s paper in detail, she decided to do exactly that. What she and her colleagues at the University of Georgia, Rebecca Steinichen and Wyatt Anderson, found contradicted Bateman in the most fundamental way. ‘We observed the movements of females and males in vials during the first five minutes of exposure to one another. Video records revealed females went toward males as frequently as males toward females; we inferred that females were as interested in males as males in females,’

‘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 he counted fathers, which is a biological impossibility, since it takes two to make a baby.

The reaction to Gowaty’s findings, however, has been mixed. ‘A lot of people were very excited about it, other people were pissed about it … It was like they were mad,’ she tells me. When I email to ask Don Symons his opinion on Gowaty’s failure to replicate Bateman’s findings, he tells me that 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.

The principles can’t be considered principles if there are so many exceptions. The problem is that Bateman’s and Trivers’ ideas have taken on such a life of their own that this does not appear to make much difference. ‘I think people are hung on Bateman’s principles. They say that the principles stand whether the data are right or not,’ says Gowaty.

I happen to think that the canon is flawed, and it’s flawed because it starts with sex differences to predict other sex differences. It is essentialist. Many of these theories that we have in evolutionary biology about sex differences are not fundamental theories. They’re hand-wavy as hell.’

This phenomenon may seem bizarre – cruel, when seen through human eyes – but it’s common across many species, including our own. It’s known as mate-guarding, and is a vitally important piece of the puzzle when it comes to understanding relationships and the balance of power between females and males. Even though it might well harm the male to have his partner so distressed through the winter, leaving her with less energy come the spring when she will need to reproduce and look after their offspring, he doesn’t stop pushing her away from the other males. It’s more important to him that he doesn’t lose her to another pigeon, even for a moment.

As a prominent activist, she talks regularly in schools about the risks of genital mutilation, and to urge girls not to become victims like her. This hasn’t come without a price: Hibo has lost friends. When it was revealed that she refused to have her daughters cut, people warned her they would be considered impure. ‘They said nobody will marry them, that they’re sluts.’ The puzzling thing about female genital mutilation is that there seem to be no winners. Not men, not women. Wives have reported depression and domestic abuse because their husbands can’t accept that they don’t want to have sex. One young man admitted to Hibo that he couldn’t bring himself to sleep with his wife on their wedding night because she had undergone infibulation, and he was afraid of hurting

Girls put pressure on each other to be cut, as they did to Hibo when she was six years old. Mothers take their own daughters to be cut, as Hibo’s did. And female elders do the cutting. ‘It’s all instigated by women. Men have nothing to do with it. But who are they doing it for? That’s the question,’ Hibo tells me.

Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy believes that it is this systematic and deliberate repression of female sexuality for millennia that really lies behind the myth of the coy, passive female.

Could it be that women and their evolutionary ancestors weren’t naturally passive, monogamous, with a tiny sex drive, the way Darwin and Bateman had assumed? Might it instead be the case that for thousands of years they had been compelled by men to behave more modestly?

Besides horrific practices like female genital mutilation, there are few places that don’t exercise a moral double standard. Passers-by tut at the teenage girl who dares to bare too much flesh. Neighbours whisper about the single mother whose children have different fathers. From how she dresses and carries herself, to how sexually active she is, most societies expect a woman to behave more modestly than a man.

One of the gang who violently raped and killed a student on a bus in India in 2012 claimed to the BBC in an interview from prison that it was her own fault for taking the bus in the first place. As far as he was concerned, she was the one who had transgressed, not him. ‘A decent girl won’t roam around at nine o’clock at night,’

This double standard is written into the laws of some countries. In Saudi Arabia, women’s sexual freedom has been effectively removed because of the long list of things they’re forbidden to do, including driving, mixing with men in public and travelling without a chaperone or a man’s permission. Although this takes repression to an extreme, the expectation of female modesty runs through many of the world’s major religions. The hijab and burqa 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.

In 1973 Sherfey published an incendiary work exploring female orgasms. It was entitled The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality. Her conclusion was that the female sex drive had been vastly underestimated, and that women are in fact naturally endowed with an insatiable sex drive. She believed that society itself was built around the demand to keep women’s sexuality in check: ‘it is conceivable that the forceful suppression of women’s inordinate sexual demands was a prerequisite to the dawn of every modern civilization and almost every living culture. Primitive woman’s sexual drive was too strong.’ Its enormous strength was matched only by the incredible force that men throughout history had deployed to restrain it.

From the smallest local laws to the most sweeping religious doctrines, she argued that cultures everywhere had tried to burn away every last scrap of female sexual freedom. This subjugation was the root of the moral double standard, the punishments and the violent brutality with which women continue to live today.

In the nineteenth century, Friedrich Engels had already drawn connections between the economic and political dominance of men and their control of female sexuality. He dramatically described this as ‘the world historical defeat of the female sex’: ‘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.

As patriarchies grew and spread, women gradually lost the power to earn a living, own property, lead a public life, or have much control over what happened to their children. The only freedoms they were afforded were within the cages that had been created for them. So they were left with little choice but to behave in ways that served the system. A modest, coy woman who appeared to be chaste would marry well and prosper, while a less modest woman would be shunned.

Does the biological drive that men have to jealously guard females from other males, combined with the fact that they’re on average bigger and have greater upper-body strength, mean that human societies would always have ended up with men in charge, controlling women and their sexuality? Is patriarchy hardwired into our biology?

According to Parish, bonobo society works the way it does because females form powerful bonds with each other, even if they aren’t related. ‘The males can be friendly. They have sex with each other. But it’s nothing like the intensity or the scope that we see in the females. They sit together, play-chase and play-wrestle, groom, share food and have sex.’

The focus on dominance in primate behaviour makes it easy to forget that there are also species out there in which the sexes co-exist and cooperate relatively peacefully. Pair-bonded tamarins and titi monkeys, for instance, share childcare 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 long post-menopausal life is so rare that as far as we know humans share it with only a few distant species, including killer whales, which stop reproducing in their thirties or forties but can survive into their nineties.