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If you were brought up with feminism and a well-meaning mother, you may have gotten the impression that women are frail, honest and moral creatures. No, let me rephrase that (because this blog is not about attacking women). If you were brought up with feminism and a well-meaning mother, you very likely got the impression that women are more frail, more honest and more moral than men are.

Roy F. Baumeister, professor of social psychology, summarized the phenomenon of idealizing women the following way:

Eagly’s research has compiled mountains of data on the stereotypes people have about men and women, which the researchers summarized as “The WAW effect.” WAW stands for “Women Are Wonderful.” Both men and women hold much more favorable views of women than of men. Almost everybody likes women better than men. I certainly do.

Societal stereotypes would thus have us believe that women are better or at least preferable to men. In a post-feminist world, where criticism of women is considered to be sexist, and criticism of men is considered to be politically correct, it can useful to take a look at research that shows us that women are just as human as men.

In a large UK survey about women and lying, some very interesting results were obtained:

HALF of all women would lie to their husbands or partners to keep their relationship going if they became pregnant by another man

They also said four out of ten (42%) would lie about contraception in order to get pregnant, in spite of the wishes of their partner.

The new survey of women’s attitudes to truth, relationships, and behaviour, said the overwhelming majority (96%) admit to lying

Eight out of ten women (83%) admit to telling “big, life-changing lies”

Partners (70%) are most likely to be lied to by women

Half (49%) would “kiss and tell” to the media for ‘25,000 if they had a one-night stand with a celebrity, and 38% say they would marry purely for money.

An alarming 31% of all women say they would not tell a future partner if they had a sexual disease. This rises for 65% for single women

A fifth of women with a long-term partner (19%) say they have cheated on him by having an affair, while 30% of all women have had an affair with a married man.

These are some pretty serious results, and they are hardly encouraging for a man looking for a committed relationship.

Does this mean that men are more honest than women? Probably not, my guess is that if the same survey had been done on men, the results would have been no more flattering. However, this survey shatters the stereotype that claims that women are wonderful, or at least more moral than men are.

Women are no more moral than men are, and the sooner we all realize that the sooner we can have true equality between the sexes.

What is evolutionary psychology and why is it interesting in a discourse about gender issues? Marriam Webster defines evolutionary psychology as the study of human cognition and behavior with respect to their evolutionary origins. In other words, the way we think and behave nowadays, may well be adaptations to solve recurrent problems in human ancestral environments.

A simplified way of putting it is that if a behavior or way of thinking was advantageous for thousands of years (for example during the stone age), then it may well have been hardwired into the human brain. We are not born as blank slates, and it makes sense that the programming that we are born with be useful for our survival and reproduction. However, what was useful in the past, may not be useful nowadays, even though the programming remains in our brains.

Evolutionary psychology can be a controversial field. Its proponents want to explain all human behavior using this theory, while its detractors emphasize the importance of human flexibility and continuous biological adaptation to the current cultural climate. In my opinion, the truth is somewhere in between those two polarities, and I leave it up to you to determine what importance you want to allot to each stance.

Let’s have a look at some of the basic principles of evolutionary biology and how they relate to gender issues:

• Since women are the ones who get pregnant (since times immemorial…), women have always been forced to choose a man carefully. A woman can only carry one child at a time, and a pregnancy takes nine months, which means that she’d better choose a man with good genes, because she won’t get very many chances to pass on her own genes. She also needs a man around who’s willing to protect and provide for the child, be it the father or a man who thinks he is the father. This means that the emotional connection to the man is crucial for a women, because the emotional connection is a good indicator of whether he’ll stick around or if he’s only interested in sex.
• The principle above changed with the introduction of the female birth control pill, which enabled women to have sex without risking pregnancy. However, the old dynamics are still part of female nature, competing with the new dynamics that the pill introduced. This means that to some extent women are still looking for a confident man who can be a good protector, and preferably a man who can provide for the child - even if she’s only interested in a sexual relationship, and not in having children.
• Men, however, do not get pregnant and therefore don’t need to choose their sexual partners as carefully. Fathering a bastard child could potentially be done at a very low cost, if you don’t have to assume the role of father for that child. However, being a committed father has always been a very good option for men, since in past eras the survival rate of your children was much higher if you stuck around.
• Since men can father a child at a very low cost while women cannot, women end up being the sexual selectors more often than men.
• Men are attracted to beautiful women. Beauty in this case is not some kind of esoteric concept, it is simply another word for proportional and symmetric facial features. Since women instinctively know that their looks are important when attracting a man, we have a whole cosmetic and plastic surgery industry catering to the needs of women. Evolutionary speaking, men are attracted to female beauty, due to symmetric facial features being a predictor of good health in the past, and good health is crucial if a woman is to survive a pregnancy, and pass on the man’s genes.
• Gay men generally care more about their looks than straight men, and know more about grooming and skin care. The reason for this is simple: gay men are looking to attract other men, and even if those other men are also gay, they are still 100 percent men - and therefore attracted to good looks. Lesbian women, on the other hand, are often more relaxed about their looks, since they are attempting to attract other women, and women care less about good looks (even though good looks are still far from unimportant).

Human beings are wonderfully flexible, adaptive and responsive creatures who can display an amazing range of behaviors, that shift according to the surrounding environment. The malleability of humans beings is so impressive that the belief that there are no inborn traits, only learned traits and adaptations, is understandable.

In the case of David Reimer (born as Bruce Reimer) the belief that there are no behavioral or brain differences between the sexes was taken to its extreme. Bruce was the victim of a circumcision (performed using an unconventional method) that went horribly wrong, leading to his penis being burnt to the extent that it could not be salvaged. His parents, distraught over the incident, were desperately looking for a way forward when an apparent solution revealed itself.

One night, the Reimers see a television profile of an American doctor and his theories on sex and gender. Dr. John Money of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore argues that boys – caught early enough – could be raised to be girls. Nurture and not nature determines a child’s gender, the doctor argued.

Janet Reimer thought it was worth exploring. The family went to Baltimore to see Dr. Money, who decided that Bruce Reimer was a perfect candidate.

It was decided the Bruce would become Brenda, and the doctor castrated him (removed his testicles). The parents were told to raise him as a girl, and that would be the end of it. However, problems quickly arose:

Janet Reimer did her best to raise Bruce as a girl. She dressed him in skirts and dresses and showed him how to apply make-up. But the transformation was anything but smooth. Bruce Reimer didn’t like playing with the other girls – and he didn’t move like one either. He got into schoolyard fistfights. The other kids called him names like “caveman,” “freak” and “it.”

Clearly, the other kids-who had no idea that Brenda had been born as Bruce-felt that s/he wasn’t behaving and playing the way young girls do. What’s even more interesting to note, is that Bruce himself had no idea that he was anything but a girl, and his parents were also raising him the way they would raise a girl. Still, he simply would not pass for a girl, according to his brother:

“The only difference between him and I was he had longer hair.” “I tried really, really hard to rear her as a gentle lady,” Janet Reimer said. “But it didn’t happen.”

Dr Money, on the other hand, was still pretending that the experiment had been a success, and claiming so in scientific journals:

He published an article in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour pronouncing the experiment a resounding success. It became widely known in medical circles as the Joan/John case.

Money wrote: “The child’s behaviour is so clearly that of an active little girl and so different from the boyish ways of her twin brother.”

I guess some people simply don’t know when to quit, and admit that they were wrong…

Things didn’t end well for David Reimer, who committed suicide at the age of 38. Fortunately, science has finally been able to put an end to the “sex-is-nothing-but-a-social-construction” belief.

Around the same time, research was sounding the death knell for the nurture vs. nature theory. Two studies – released by the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center – concluded that it’s prenatal exposure to male hormones that turns normal male babies into boys. The studies “seriously question the current practice of sex-reassigning some of these infants as females…”

Since then, researchers have shown that it’s not only prenatal testosterone that turns the brain into a male brain, the Y chromosome also plays an important part.

Nurture vs nature has been resolved: it’s not either/or, it’s both, and they also interact throughout life.