Inferior

by Angela Saini

  At this point, though, let me tell you the story of another anthropologist.

  In 2015 Melvin Konner, who’s based at Emory University, took inspiration from Montagu’s book and wrote his own, titled Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy. He argues that some qualities common to women make them natural leaders in the modern age. “I happen to think it’s superior to be less violent,” Konner tells me, when I interview him about it. If brute strength is a large part of the reason for male supremacy, then in an age when strength matters less and violence appears to be declining, he says, women should naturally ascend. “I think it’ll be a better world if women have more influence.”

  It doesn’t sound all that radical now. After all, change is already underway. We have women leaders. Indeed, some critics have found Konner’s arguments more than a little patronizing. But the simple idea of women being in charge, which may have been amusingly provocative when Montagu’s The Natural Superiority of Women appeared on the shelves in 1952, is taken very differently these days. 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.

  And today, as women across the world fight for more freedoms and equality, there are again violent efforts to hold them back. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that aims to advance reproductive rights, the last five years have seen a sharp rise in attempts by some US states to impose restrictions on a woman’s right to an abortion. Some of these are limits on abortion medication, others on private insurance coverage and rules about abortion clinics. “The sustained assault on abortion access is showing no signs of abating,” a news release by the institute warned in January 2016.

  Similarly, despite enormous efforts to raise awareness, female feticide in South Asia and female genital mutilation in Africa remain endemic. The spread of religious fundamentalism, which emphasizes female modesty, is also seeing the promise of female sexual freedom decaying right before our eyes.

  A phenomenon known as the “Nordic Paradox” shows that equality under the law doesn’t always guarantee women will be treated better. Iceland has among the highest levels of female participation in the labor market anywhere in the world, with heavily subsidized child care and equal parental leave for mothers and fathers. In Norway, since 2006, the law has required that at least 40 percent of listed company board members are women. Yet a report in May 2016 published in Social Science and Medicine reveals that Nordic countries have a disproportionately high rate of intimate partner violence against women. One theory to explain the paradox is that Nordic countries may be experiencing a backlash effect as traditional ideas of manhood and womanhood are challenged.

  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. The battle for minds in the fight for equality has to include the biological facts.

  Pretty much every scientist I interviewed for this book who is working to challenge negative research about women told me she or he is a feminist. This doesn’t make them any less brilliant at their work. In some cases, just the opposite. The social psychologist Carol Tavris, author of The Mismeasure of Woman: Why Women Are Not the Better Sex, the Inferior Sex, or the Opposite Sex, puts it to me this way: “Here is feminism, which involves ideological, political, and moral beliefs and goals. And here is science, which requires us to put our beliefs and assumptions, including those inspired by feminism, to empirical test. . . . For decades feminism has been a lens that illuminated biases in science. It made science better. Women began studying questions about women’s lives—menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth, sexuality, work and careers, love—that most male researchers simply weren’t interested in. When men did include women in their studies and found gender differences, they often concluded that women weren’t just different from men, but deficient. So feminism was a crucial way to explode beliefs that people held that were just wrong.”

  When I set out to write this book, I wanted to get to the heart of the facts, even if they were uncomfortable. Where the facts weren’t clear, I wanted to highlight the debates around them. I didn’t want to show that one sex is inferior and the other superior (I don’t believe that’s a distinction anyone can even reasonably make). I just wanted to better understand the biological story about myself and other women. As I’ve learned, science is far from perfect. That’s not the fault of the method but of us. We imperfect creatures crash its home and dirty its carpets with our feet. We throw our weight around when we should instead be its respectful guests. With us in charge, science can only be a self-correcting journey toward the truth. As such, none of the research I’ve written about represents the end of the story. Theories are only theories, waiting for more evidence.

  But however unclear the research is in some areas, I did find reassurance that science has everything to offer women and men who want to live in a fairer world. Feminism can be a friend to science. It not only improves how science is done by pushing researchers to include the female perspective, but science in turn can also show us that we’re not as different as we seem. Research to date suggests that humans survived, thrived, and spread across the globe through the efforts of everyone equally sharing the same work and responsibilities. For most of our history, we lived hand in hand. And our biology reflects this.

  In some ways, of course, our biology makes no difference to how we live today. We’ve entered the epoch that scientists call the “anthropocene,” in which humans are recognized to have had a profound impact on global ecosystems. We control our environments in ways that no other animal can. What’s more, we control ourselves. We have birth control that can stop women getting pregnant and paternity tests that allow fathers to identify their children. Within decades, it may be possible to delay menopause far into old age. Artificial intelligence may eventually rewrite the laws of work and love. The world in which we evolved into humans isn’t the same anymore. We’ve given ourselves the option to live any way we want.

  In this world, then, it may seem strange that we’re laboring under the same old stereotypes that have been around for centuries, that we’re taking so long to make sexual equality a reality when the power to do it is entirely in our own hands. The cloudy window of the past has so distorted how we see society that we find it hard to imagine it another way. This is why science matters for every one of us. The job ahead for researchers is to keep cleaning the window until we see ourselves as we truly are, the way Ashley Montagu tried to do, and as so many pioneering researchers have done and continue to do today.

  The facts are what will empower us to transform society for the better, into one that treats us as equals. Not just because this makes us civilized but
because, as the evidence already shows, this makes us human.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In spring 2014, Ian Tucker, an editor at the Observer, asked me to write a story about menopause. That story opened me up to a huge wealth of research on women, and in particular the controversies inside the scientific community about how to define what a woman is. It was also the kernel for this book. I’d like to thank my editor Louise Haines at Fourth Estate for taking a punt on another book on sex and gender, and for her invaluable guidance and ideas. Thanks also to Amy Caldwell at Beacon Press, who came up with the title. My agents, Peter Tallack and Tisse Takagi, provided enormous help in shaping the idea in the first place and improving the manuscript when it was finished.

  My heartfelt thanks also to the Society of Authors and the K Blundell Trust, which generously provided me with a research grant to allow me the time to write, buy books, and travel for research. Without their help, as a working mother I simply wouldn’t have been able to finish this. I hope their kindness to other writers in the same position as me never ends.

  Many thanks to the Manuscripts Room at the Cambridge University Library for allowing me special access to Charles Darwin’s private correspondence, including his letters to and from Caroline Kennard of Brookline, Massachusetts. Also, thanks to the Wellcome Library in London for access to their archive collection of pharmaceutical advertisements. The UK Intersex Association and Intersex UK gave me help and advice on issues surrounding intersex conditions.

  I am also grateful to a number of friends and academics for their assistance in proofreading certain chapters. They include Richard Quinton, Norman Fenton, Paul Matthews, Tom Vulliamy, Jahnavi Phalkey, Denise Sheer, Tim Power, Monica Niermann, Rainer Niermann, Rima Saini, and Mukul Devichand. Sarah Hrdy, Patricia Gowaty, and Robert Trivers were particularly generous with their time in answering my incessant questions. Dawn Starin was kind enough to offer her immense expertise in all my chapters on evolution. And Preeti Jha and Pramod Devichand read the whole thing with care and gave me invaluable feedback. But my deepest and most heartfelt thanks go to Peter Wrobel. I already thought he was the sharpest reader I knew, but his thoughts and fact checking of my manuscript have made me admire him more.

  It’s impossible to write a book and raise a two-year-old without the help of a village. The people I must thank most are my mother-in-law, Neena, who took considerable time off from her job as a doctor every week to look after her grandson, and my wonderful husband, Mukul, who was willing to forgo my company and to care for our son alone in the evenings and weekends so I could write and travel.

  I am grateful to all my family and friends, as I am to my much-loved son, Aneurin, for making me smile every time I looked up from my reading. I hope he will one day read this book, because I wrote it with his future in mind.

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  Chapter 1: Woman’s Inferiority to Man

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