Well, the brave author of a recently published book says true. And he’s a bloke!
I do love a good-natured debate and there is plenty to be had when it comes to gender. I heard a radio interview this week that grabbed my attention – and not just because they played Betty Hutton and Howard Keel singing “Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better” from Annie Get Your Gun at the intro. (I also love a good musical!)
It was an interview with an American anthropologist and medical doctor, Melvin Konner, whom I have not previously been familiar with, who has just released his latest book entitled: ‘Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy‘.
It’s an audacious, courageous title, and no doubt he was egged on by the publishers, keen to make a few waves and sell more copies. Dr Konner has certainly succeeded in ruffling more than the odd feather, but in the interview, he didn’t come across at all as any kind of obsessive hardliner or mad zealot.
On the contrary, he sounds like a pretty reasonable sort of fellow and he is clearly very smart. Aged 69, he is currently Professor of Anthropology and of Neuroscience and Behavioural Biology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, in the US. He has a PhD in biological anthropology from Harvard University and a medical degree from Harvard Medical School and has taught at Harvard and then at Emory, for over 30 years.
Because women are less egotistical, more cooperative, less violent and less hypersexual and they are more focused on building relationships and cooperatively moving forward, it so happens that those differences favour women in the future – Prof Melvin Konner
So what’s behind the audacious title?
Konner says he believes women are not equal to men. Rather, as he said in the interview, “they are superior in many ways and in most of the ways that will count in the future.”
This is what really piqued my interest, and not just because I’m a girl! The core of what he is saying seems to be that we are living in a very different and more rapidly changing world today from the one we have lived in for the last couple of millennia and that the core biological traits and characteristics of women are actually better suited to succeeding in this new world – and in enabling the world to succeed – than biologically male traits and characteristics.
Women he says, are builders rather than destroyers, can be cooperative as well as competitive; and are much more capable of managing people. Men on the other hand have a ‘hair trigger’ for violence and a ‘driven sexuality’ – which he quips has disrupted the careers of male politician’s right up to the President of the United States.
“It so happens,” he says, “that because women are less egotistical, more cooperative, less violent and less hypersexual and they are more focused on building relationships and cooperatively moving forward, it so happens that those differences favour women in the future.”
“The world will improve greatly when women have a more balanced share of the power and influence in all kinds of organisations – national governments, local governments, corporations and so on,” he said.
In practical terms, Konner believes, “you can create cultures and social orders where women have enough of a role that men don’t set each other off on these cycles of competition, violence and egotism.”
While it may seem hard to believe for some, he says, “there has been a huge decline in the amount of violence and war in modern times, compared to mediaeval and ancient times.
“Women will extend this trend,” he says. “And it will be better for everybody.”
The nub of it
Not having read the book, I wouldn’t pretend to understand all there is to know about Konner’s argument. And of course, as he freely admits, he has been deliberately provocative.
So I went looking and found an excerpt from the introduction to the book, published in The Scientist, in which he declares, almost evangelically:
“Millennial male dominance is about to come to an end,” and later, “Male domination has outlived any purpose it may once have had. Perhaps it played some role in our success as a species so far, but now it is an obstacle. Empowering women is the next step in human evolution […]”
But between these exclamations that are sure to upset plenty of people, the argument he makes seems quite sensible to me. It’s about the biological characteristics of the female species having a much stronger evolutionary role in our current point in history in securing the future of humankind and the planet. A hopeful future, he believes, is dependent on women and girls being educated and taking an equal place.
“The freer and more educated girls and women become, the fewer children they have; men are proven obstacles to family planning. Even in the poorest lands, the increasing availability of women’s suffrage, health services, microloans, and savings programs, is giving them control over their destinies. As soon as that happens, they reduce the size and poverty of their families. It becomes clearer every year that the best way to spend an aid dollar in the developing world is to educate and empower women and girls. The consequences are manifold.
“Replacing quantity with quality in childbearing will not save just women, or even just struggling, impoverished countries. It will save the planet and make it habitable for our species. It will greatly reduce the necessity for violence of all kinds, as it has already begun to do.”
As he said in the interview, “it so happens that because women are less egotistical, more cooperative, less violent and less hypersexual and they are more focused on building relationships cooperatively moving forward; it so happens that those differences favour women in the future.”
This doesn’t have to be about gender wars and one gender being ‘better’ than the other. We know that’s hyperbole and so does Konner. But it is certainly not lost on me that the world could be a safer, more harmonious, more enduring place if women made more of the decisions. Or at least had an equal influence in making them.
I don’t think anyone would shoot me down for that view. Or would you?
