Are Gender Roles Natural?
How the dominant class uses pseudo-science to reinforce oppressive stereotypes.
Blaming gender roles on nature or evolution may be as old as gender roles themselves. What’s remarkable is that it can be used to justify everything and it’s opposite — You can say that women’s modesty is linked to their need to be picky when selecting a mate, or that their promiscuity is linked to the need to reproduce at all costs during their fertile periods. You can say that the clitoris emerged to encourage women to have sex and reproduce, or you can argue that female orgasms are a myth, that would serve no evolutionary purpose at all. Or, as a guy called Kyle wrote on Facebook:
My condolences to any women who have slept with Kyle.
When you talk about sexism or archaic gender roles, people often refer to evolution to justify the status quo, presenting our current social structures as the direct result of nature. I always find it amusing when we try and justify human behaviors with nature, because our society could not be further from a natural state of being. Trolls type out their arguments about gender roles being completely natural on their high-spec gamer computers while eating food made from artificial chemicals and they see no irony at all. Our society has reached the stage where our way of life is actively destroying the planet that keeps us alive — I struggle to see how we can still act as though we are following some sort of natural order.
When you actually look at nature, it is far more diverse than our arguments would have us believe.
Take monkeys and their mating rituals. Anthropologists Evelyn Reed, Elaine Morgan, amongst others, showed that female primates are the sexual initiators, and they took it in turn to be the most desirable in the troop, a “cycle that keeps turning as long as she lives.” This desirability, in some primates, is shown physically through inflamed pink sexual organs — which is not a hierarchal female primate characteristic, but a universal one that each female presents at different times, thereby eliminating the idea of “beauty” as being our…
