The remarkably stupid evolutionary ‘science’ that men are obsessed with

Men are naturally logical? Women are monogamous? What?

Before you mansplain to me, and I know you are desperate to, I specialised in human behavioural ecology (HBE), evolutionary psychology, sex selection and human evolution and genetics for my BSc. So if you’re going to come at me with your TikTok gender facts, I will destroy you and devour your flesh with a sadistic, gluttonous hunger unknown to all but the giants of Goya’s nightmares. Just so we’re clear, babydoll.

“Men, straight men,” a moron explained to me recently, “have a biological need to be needed by a woman. It’s the key to their mental health. Therapy alone won’t work.” I thought, grimly, to the deadbeat dads, the cruel Casanovas, and self-proclaimed lone wolves I knew and wondered where they fitted into this scientific hypothesis. On the contrary, they seem delighted at having no obligation to any woman. Proud of it. It is an essential part of who they are. I don’t need a woman tying me down. I don’t see why I should pay for those kids, I don’t want to see them. I don’t do love or relationships. Don’t tell me you don’t know exactly what I mean: the truth is, a huge number of men not only don’t “biologically need to be needed by a woman”, they deeply resent having obligations to or having to provide for a woman.

Similarly, this weird belief in women’s natural status as ‘nurturing’ and ‘healing’. I know some horribly unfeeling women. Cold, hard, uncaring women who couldn’t keep a cactus alive, let alone mop your ailing brow with tender nothings. Women who have the empathy of rock. I’ve even had to explain to one a woman that her callous rejection of her husband made him feel sad and lonely. We all know about stiff mothers who definitely shouldn’t have had children, career women who have no interest at all in playing tradwife, and those who openly detest displays of emotion, sexuality and affection. That’s not unusual either. I’d say, same as with men who don’t want to settle, have kids, or hold down a job, many of us just don’t want to be warm soft kitchen queens. It’s not who we are.

So: why do so many Andrew Tate ‘science’ adoring men believe this weird ‘fact’ of the ‘natural’ caring woman and the ‘natural’ provider man? The problem with this, really, is that we don’t really have any well-documented, definitive examples of how any of these “Cave Men” thought, behaved, or lived. The ‘Cave Man Society’, if by that you mean our homogenous (another whole debate there) ancestors in what is now Africa, is largely a collection of hypotheses we’ve inherited from anthropological behaviourists working in the 1880s.

We can make assumptions, sure, based on what we know about bone density, genetic drift and stone tools, but we know very little about how cultures and communities functioned before about 20,000 years ago. We were, bluntly, a nomadic herd primate who moved from scavenging and hunter gathering to semi-settled communities with regional hunting. The one thing I can tell you about humans is that our brains have evolved to be extremely plastic. We successfully colonised every continent, every biome, and every ecosystem before we ever lit a match or built a house. We can live on grasses and plant roots in the alps, and we can live entirely on seal meat in the far north. We can be polyandric or rigidly monogamous. We can live in caves and sleep under the stars. We can be extreme pacifists or violent tribal cannibals. We can work out how to plant fields and build computers: what we are, and what we have the capacity to be, is far, far greater than any other species on earth. I’d look into transhumanism if that’s exciting for you but anyway. What I’m saying is: what human behaviour has ‘evolved’ to do or be has more range than say, what we might observe in the social complexity of lemurs or lobsters.

So when we talk about humans: we’re not just talking about ladies liking the big handsome monkey with the reddest bottom, or the gentlemen wanting the sexy gorilla with the most fruit. We’re really, really fucking complicated. Why?

Culture.

You only need to look at recent history to know this is true. What is sexy? Is it a chubby woman with a round stomach, small breasts and very small lips? It was in 1900. Is it an extremely thin 17 year old girl with short hair? It was in 1965. What is an ideal man? An industrialist with a big bushy moustache and a cigar? An obese dairy farmer who owns all the cows in the area? A slim, long-eyelashed young artist who cross dresses as a woman sometimes? I could go on. The reality is: we’re on a spectrum. We might point to common trends like wealth, resources, height, social prestige and fertility, but when I say studies contradict, backtrack, mix up, misunderstand, and downright fail on this field, I’m really not joking. I’ll give you a really good example:

A study in the 1970s wanted to look at how men and women behaved in terms of sexuality. They put an attractive young woman out on the street, and asked her to approach men and see how many men agreed to casual sex. As expected: almost all the men were eager to have sex with her. They did the same, with the genders reversed: but almost no women wanted to have sex with the attractive young male stranger. Ah, the study concluded: women want sex less than men.

Except…that was just the wrong conclusion. What the study forgot was that the women had a reason to not have sex with the young man: slut shaming, fear of violence, and fear of rough or unpleasant sex. The men were not worried about experiencing this at all from the attractive young women. The desire for sex was, really, pretty similar: but women selected for partners they knew and felt safe with, due to the threats they were aware of. So there was nothing ‘innate’ about women not wanting sex at all, really: it was the learnt fear of what having sex would mean in that culture. In cultures where women had control over sex in their societies; that is to say, polyandric matriarchal tribes, it was extremely common for women to choose different sexual partners for a night and have several ‘husbands’ without any shame regarding their ‘body-count’ or ‘promiscuity’. Sex, like everything else in life, is cultural: in the USSR, men complained that they couldn’t buy sex from women with nylon tights or chocolate anymore because women could afford to buy their own. In the UK, it used to be extremely common to whistle at and pinch women’s bottoms in the street: now you’ll only very rarely experience this as the culture and behaviour has changed. A hundred years ago, a woman would have been considered too stupid, weak and emotional to be a surgeon: now over half of doctors are women. We haven’t evolved. We’ve just decided to function differently. Like I said, we’re plastic brained. Versatile.

Now I’m not saying that there aren’t gendered commonalities or any biological reasons for us to behave the way we do: of course there are. There’s a reason we have words for man, woman, mother, father. But the idea that the natural state has and will always be big strong smart man, submissive gentle woman, and nuclear happy family is just wildly untrue. Is it that women want social security and for their children to be provided for, or is it that people want social security and for their children to be provided for? Is it that men want to feel included and valued, or is it that people want to feel included and valued? Is it that women want social status and prestige, or is it that people want social status and prestige? Is the woman in your study actually being bossy, or are you unused to seeing a woman as a leader? The first real rule of science is to apply the scientific method: make sure you aren’t making assumptions that are heavily ignoring vectors or natural biases you already have.

Please, please think about believing these extreme, blanket statements about gender, ability, personality, and behaviours. I promise you:

More are about your culture than you might think.