The hidden factor

Explained a little more, obvious flaws fixed, and otherwise new and improved.

some stupid people find it funny to ask, if it is new, then how is it improved? They think they are clever, bastards....

Explained a little more, obvious flaws fixed, and otherwise improved so much that it is new.


Gender, is believed to be a social identity independent of somewhat sex (does this mean forms should have separate fields for gender and sex?). In the entire feminist movement and the gender - actually sex struggle, what has emerged is a belief that gender is brought about by sex based social conditioning – so to speak that the society moulds the males and the females to become men and women. The focus of the feminist movement is to counter this kind of social conditioning to bring into existence, eventually at least, only one gender.
This would mean that Women would not be restricted to the four walls of their homes, would not be treated as property or sex objects, would enjoy suffrage, and basically do what they want to do and not suffer male domination, or worse, their chivalry.
I am pretty much sympathetic towards the need for the sexes to be equal, but feminists (even of the male kind) should perhaps also understand that there is another important factor that constructs a gender, something that is ignored or more often than not, simply overlooked. Yes, social conditioning is not entirely at blame, at least some amount of the responsibility should be borne by the genes.
Before going any further, let me make some things clear. Sexism is derogatory, unproductive and unfair and just because it may be inherent, does not mean that it is a justification. Men reading this should not use this as a defense against feminism, but women please be occasionally sympathetic to the odd display of chivalry. All I am really saying is that the feminist cannot expect to counter more than four million years of evolutionary inertia, without even knowing about it.
Natural selection more often than not, comes up with ingenious ways to circumvent – to put it mildly, an inconvenience. Take for example, the gills of the sharks and the blowholes of the whales or the membranous wings of the bats and the feathery (I am amazed that that’s actually a word) wings of a crow. This is how the separate sexes (we’ve not come to the genders yet) evolved in the first place. Humans have two kinds of gametes now, sperms and ova. Initially, there was only one kind of gamete. These gametes used to meet each other and a new organism would be born. Now came the interesting bit, for a gamete to get an evolutionary edge over other gametes, it had to do something different from the other gametes. Amazingly enough, evolution actually preferred both strategies, becoming smaller as well as bigger. Natural selection selected gametes that were larger than the others because they were able to provide more nutrition to the organism inside. At the same time, natural selection also favored the smaller ones because they were able to move around faster and exploit the resources of the large gametes (gender showing up already?). Therefore, unfortunately, the poor gametes that were neither here or there died out, and the other became progressively smaller or progressively larger.
Now all organisms behave in a way that is most beneficial to the process of procreation. Read the Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins for an explanation, but the crux of the matter is that, at all the actions of organisms are directed towards creating offspring, and bringing them up so that they can have offspring of there own. Whether this is true for humans is a moot point, and an argument that needn’t be entered into here, but believers of Freud’s psychosexual motivation theory would attest that humans to behave like this – I believe that they needn’t. At least when humans were yet primitive beings, their actions were directed towards contributing the most to the gene pool, and there were many ways problems were approached. Matriarchal societies existed at various points in both place and time, but this is to explain why patriarchal, male dominated societies evolved.
Males were, since the very beginning, opportunists and exploiters, while females cared and nourished. The problem was that the capacity for reproduction was skewed heavily in the favor of men. While men could impregnate many women at once, and continuously through a sexually active lifespan of around forty five years, women could only go through, at the upper limit, around fifteen pregnancies in as much time (note: more babies could come to be because of twins and triplets in these pregnancies). The result was that men would impregnate a woman and run, without putting in any effort into the upbringing of the child. The response from the females was to develop an interesting thing called sexual crypsis. They would voluntarily or involuntarily - simply hide the periods when they were fertile, and therefore the males had to hang around and keep trying. This worked for men as well, because if the female got away when she was fertile, and mated with some other male, then the man would be at a loss of a child, and probably resources as well. Women and men were almost equally prone to infidelity (upto eight percent of kids are brought up by men who think they are his children) – and since men have more to lose because of infidelity, they started keeping an almost continuous watch over their mates. Therefore the habit of mate guarding started, where the man would make sure he was always around the woman.
This later lead to the tradition of keeping the women within the four walls of the house. You think this died out after we started diluting these traditions? Think again – why do guys like to simply hang out with their girls? – It is a form of mate guarding. All the male domination was only mate guarding. Men were overprotective about their daughters because their efforts would have been wasted if their grandchildren were not brought up in a good environment – hence the need to search for wealthy suitors. Which brings us to female infanticide - both parents prefer male children because of the greater reproductive capacity of the male child. This brings about the burning issue of female infanticide. Female infanticide makes sense to both, the mother and the father, as the female child is not likely to procreate as much as a male child. Why should the parents waste their resources on bringing up a female child when the male child can make a much greater contribution to the gene pool, or at least, has the potential to do so? The male child has a much better chances of spreading the genes of the parents, and therefore male children are evolutionarily to female children. Disturbing I know, and especially here, I would like to reinforce the point that genetics should not be used as an excuse. Diseases are borne by the genes as well. Nature has its own ways of equalizing the sexes to equal numbers if the sex ratio becomes too lop sided. Behavior driven by genes is simply all pervading and manifests itself even in simpler things. Simpler things like chivalry - when men pay for the meals, or open the doors of cars, what they are really doing is saying “look, I have so many resources at my disposal, and I am caring, I will be a good father and provider.” Nothing terribly wrong with that I suppose, except women would feel the need to equally provide, and would interpret this gesture in a different way and think the man is saying “you are too poor to pay for your meals and too stupid to open car doors”. Excuse this sexist observation, but sometimes women think too much.
Of course, social conditioning plays and important role, and proper conditioning can alone counter the way of our evolution. Maybe this article may bring the sex and the gender closer together, but that’s not really a problem here. The only constant, as everybody knows, is change, and now the males may have to stop being men in order to procreate with more ease, in this feminist world. If women do not dig chivalry, then it sure as hell will go out of fashion. Adaptation, is an integral part of evolution, and in a such a dynamic world, social, cultural and possibly the worst, evolutionary inertia are the most dangerous things. The world is changing, a single gender will probably evolve, but this will only happen if we work against all the factors involved. I wanted to conclude with a sexist joke – but I guess I have already become (working against my genes, by the way) a slightly better man – or as feminists would put it – person.