The Feminist War on Science

On its face the conclusion seems intuitively obvious and unobjectionable.

Things being what they are, today’s researchers needed to interview a group of college students to establish the facts of the matter.

The matter in question is not the sexual behavior of college students, but, more specifically their sexual regrets.

Lo and behold, they discovered that young women are more likely to regret having indulged in too many or the wrong kind of sexual experiences while young men are more likely to regret having missed out on sexual opportunities, for not having been sufficient assertive.

Amanda Hess, no fan of the study, summarizes its conclusions:

… female students were more likely to express regret over sexual actions they’d taken—like “losing their virginity” to the “wrong partner”—while male students were more likely to feel remorse over actions they did not take—like being “too shy to indicate sexual attraction to someone.”

That male and female sexual behaviors differ significantly is central to Darwinian psychology. One might even say that it is settled science.

The science says that men and women have significantly different reproductive potential—men can in their lifetime produce far more offspring than can women—that the direct consequences of conception are vastly different for the two sexes and that it's far easier for a man to walk away from a pregnancy, men and women are psychologically predisposed to live their sexuality differently.

In so doing they are acting rationally and making decisions based on the reality of their experience. As a rule, women are more selective and more cautious in choosing sexual partners while men are more reckless.

You probably did not need Darwin to tell you this and you probably do not need a degree in biology to understand it. As I say, it feels unobjectionable.

Human psychology and human behavior are, to some extent, hard wired into the organism. And it is likely that they have been part of the human makeup for quite some time now.

Evidently, feminists find this all to be offensive. They prefer ideology to science and rush out to attack any scientific study that contradicts their deeply held convictions. 

Many feminists also believe that their ideology and the concomitant indoctrination that so many people have undergone has radically altered human nature, to the point where the experience of their grandparents is not relevant to the way they live their life.

If this isn’t out-of-control narcissism, I don’t know what is.

Or better, in this ideologically driven view of humanity, people become silly putty, to be molded by their new masters into a form that corresponds to their ideas. 

Whatever the merits or demerits of specific policy prescriptions, the feminist enterprise is geared toward reducing, even obliterating the difference between the sexes.

For example, if women are allowed to have abortion on demand then it would be "almost" as easy for a woman to walk away from conception as it is for a man. And obviously, complete access to contraception would strike another blow against the patriarchy. All we need now is the invention of gestation devices to replace wombs. Then we can all pretend that men and women are the same.

Note well that the logic of evolutionary psychology has nothing to do with the way people lived during the Stone Age. It takes the realities of human biology as a constant. Stone Age behaviors might be relevant, if we knew very much about them, but so would the way human beings functioned in Biblical times, in ancient Rome, in primitive cultures and during the last century.

For her part, Hess is deeply offended that anyone would care compare today’s college students with hunter-gatherer, Stone Age cultures. And yet, without having to quiz a bunch of college students, a minimal amount of ratiocination tells us that where Stone Age women were expert at gathering, today’s woman is equally expert in a correlative activity: shopping.

Still and all, nothing about the argument thus far requires that we understand the psyche of the Cave Man or Woman. I underscore the point, and I present the case for evolutionary biology in terms of biological constants. this grounds the theory in reality, not in speculation about the way we all lived way back then.

These facts have not impressed the feministocracy. Hess reduces science to mythmaking and dismisses it:

So evo-psychologists look to “modern-day hunter-gatherers as proxies” for Stone Age psyches, then rely on a lot of guesswork to crudely construct the gender dynamics of our ancestral homes. Scientists in the field make projections about our deep ancestors that are colored by their understanding of contemporary human beings; then, they use those projections to “explain” why differences between modern men and women have been set in stone for millennia, and are unlikely to budge any time soon.

So what's the point in "proving" that among a tiny sample of college students, a handful of men and women feel a different sort of deep regret about sexual scenarios that we can vaguely compare to our fantasies about the gender roles of our prehistoric ancestors? A study of the sex lives of 200 college students can’t actually tell us anything about how our early ancestors shacked up, and vice versa. It could, however, speak to the masturbatory tendencies of some scientists.

But, since when did feminists believe that masturbation is a bad thing? When did masturbation become an insult? In the old days, feminists promoted masturbation as a way for women to liberate themselves from the tyranny of male sexuality. Besides, it’s foolproof contraception.

As for the notion that evolutionary psychology rests on a mythic reconstruction of the Stone Age psyche or even the Stone Age social organization, it is a nonsensical caricature, one that is specifically designed to erase the biology of gender difference.

One has slightly more sympathy for the complaint about the mind of the average American college student, but if the responses of those students are not as clearly defined as an evolutionary psychologist would expect, the reason might be that they have been indoctrinated by feminist ideology and conduct their lives accordingly.

When placed in an academic setting where they are answering question they are certainly cognizant of what the politically correct answers are.

The only real myth here is the myth of gender sameness, a myth for which there is no evidence whatever.

To be fair, many feminists believe that their ideology has transformed women and men so radically that they do not even resemble their grandparents. By this logic, we are a brand new species and we can make it up as we please.

Effectively, this anti-science intends to write human beings out of the natural world, to say nothing of the animal kingdom.

If human beings do not have fundamental and essential qualities in common with their ancestors, they will become silly putty in the hands of ideologues.

Now, Hess and other anti-scientists point out that the studies performed by evolutionary psychologists on college students are not as definitive as one would wish. The differences are not marginal, but they are not as radical as the Darwinian hypothesis would suggest.

But, what exactly does this prove? Does it show that human being is more plastic than the scientists imagined? Or does it show that young American college students, products of their culture as well as of their nature, have learned what is and is not the correct way to think about sexual regret.

If the reality of evolutionary psychology rested on a quiz given to some American college students, Hess might have a point. In truth, the quiz shows that human nature remains in tact, even after having been indoctrinated.