Thank you for this review. I would like to add one point: Yes, it is our job to transcend our instincts as far as possible without becoming mentally ill, and women are productive members of our society, but in terms of the cultural spirit of today, I think it's important to start thinking about female aggression and its brutality (social exclusion is painful, as it's the equivalent of being left alone in the desert = death) and how it affects our current society, and how male aggression, which can also be brutal, opens the window to reconciliation and forgiveness (because losing a possible ally may have been a bad thing in the past). I think we could benefit from a fusion of the best of both female and male aggression by continuing to leave out the physical aggression of males but restoring the male mode of reconciliation and forgiveness and to restrict public shaming to a minimum (end cancel culture).
I am catching up on some of your older posts... A very interesting and insightful one. I would like to note that Harvard was going 'woke' back around 2004, back when I was hanging out with students there. I don't know when matters reached the faculty or the general society professors run in--if anything, I imagine it reaching them much earlier, if they had ever exited the PC-wave of the early 90s.
It is a book whose potential fans have been, however, largely pushed out of 'respectable' society, though perhaps it is also not well known because it doesn't sound *wrong* enough to excite a lot of argument, nor does it sound like it focuses on sex and beauty, which humans are rather attracted to.
Thank you, well, they are visible on the front page too so I guess that is normal. I don't consider them confidential, although they are probably also not very interesting. Can I ask you one thing? How disturbing are they, in your opinion? I would have preferred to hide paid posts better because I'm afraid they worsen the general impression, but Substack works the way it works.
I haven't read the book and wonder how much I'm missing but this review raises many questions and concerns:
Other women are competitors for babysitting but don't other women also provide the babysitting? How is that not a net neutral factor?
For how much of prehistory were men warriors? Were there times of so few humans, Neanderthals, etc. that warring was uncommon for most? Is it true for more modern hunter gatherers?
Were prehistoric humans monogamous or polygamous? How would polygamy change the dynamics between men? How would it change competition for husbands?
Some societies are matriarchal. Some animals, such as elephants, are matriarchal. Where does that play into this?
The whole thing seems overly reductionist but of course the book might be less like that or make a stronger case. Maybe the exceptions are relatively minor but I'm not so sure. At minimum I agree there are real differences between men and women.
>>For how much of prehistory were men warriors? Were there times of so few humans, Neanderthals, etc. that warring was uncommon for most?
People might have spent very little time making war against each other during most of history. Still, if they spend ANY time in lethal conflicts against other groups they encounter, preparing for those moments is likely to be of tremendous importance. So even if prehistoric humans spent little time engaging in war, it is still likely that they adapted for between-group aggression as long as it existed at all.
>>Other women are competitors for babysitting but don't other women also provide the babysitting? How is that not a net neutral factor?
There are women and there are women. Other women of reproductive age are mostly competitors: They need a lot for their own children. Post-reproductive women, most of all maternal grandmothers, are a great resource as baby-sitters.
Recently - in a certain kind of feminist journalism - I keep coming across something I see as a positive trend.......acknowledgements that Masculinity and Femininity are complementary polarities in any sane conception of The Good Life. An acknowledgement that the relationship between a man and a woman has the potential to be the finest fruit that life has to offer. And that when things go wrong, they are often better understood as resulting from a kind of Faustian tango between the sexes than as a simple case of one sex always doing wrong by the other. All just timeless truths and plain common sense you might say - and Yes perhaps these timeless truths have ever obtained in the kitchens and bedrooms of our Western society. But they are ones that have been conspicuous by their absence in the groves of academe and in the fourth estate in recent decades. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/shall-we-dance
"[K[illing the adult men and incorporating the women and children into the group of the victors is so common that it has become an explicit norm of conduct."
Is this true, especially at the hunter-gatherer level, at which most of human evolution took place? Certainly, it's true that the fitness of victorious males is increased by incorporating captured women of childbearing age, and perhaps girls who're close to that age, into their group. But wouldn't there be an evolutionary disincentive to keep boys, who wouldn't share any of the male victors' genes, and who might later become sexual competitors with the victors' male relatives? Keeping young girls might also be contraindicated, since a girl-child would be competing for maternal resources with any children that a victor subsequently produced with their mother, and thus diminishing the fitness of those children.
This would seem to give women a stronger interest in the outcome of warfare than is suggested here. Capture in war represents more than a change from one oppressor to another; it also means the likely loss of any children that they're produced up to that time.
The Yanomamö of the Amazon rainforest, which, I believe, are the best studied horticulturalists, considered killing women in raid warfare bad form. They only kidnapped women, and at rather high rates: Among lowland Yanomamö 17 percent of women had changed owners through kidnapping one time or more (Noble Savages by Napoleon Chagnon, 57 percent of e-book).
There should be one report about Yanomamö males killing a male infant in the book on Helena Valero (unfortunately I haven't read it because it is difficult to get hold of). But normally, the Yanomamö kidnapped mothers together with their children. Why did they just not kill the children, especially the infants, like apes and monkeys and lions and horses and mice do? I don't know. But it could be a concession to the kidnapped women. They might be more eager to cooperate if their children aren't killed. Also, taking care of children was not obviously very hard work for Yanomamö men.
Other societies have been less principled against killing women in warfare. The Dugum Dani of Papua New Guinea, also horticulturalists, sometimes killed neighboring women when they tended their fields. The Dani considered it a kind of suicide for a woman to just walk to their more distant fields without cautiously looking for raiders. (I read that in a book called The Dugum Dani by Karl Heider).
One difference between the Dani and the Yanomamö was their population density. The Dugum Dani lived in a crowded environment, very close to their enemies. The Yanomamö kept many kilometers of pristine rainforest between enemy villages. I suppose that the availability of land made women more valuable along the Yanomamö - there was always land where a new woman could be placed to work.
I have read one observation of women participating in war: Escaped convict William Buckley lived among Australian Aborigines for 33 years. He reported that women participated in battles when their men gave them a signal that they were badly needed. Also the Australian Aborigines kidnapped women from each other, although they were hunter-gatherers instead of horticulturalists.
From what I have read, I have made the loose conclusion that kidnapping of women was the most common at the horticulturalist state, when land was abundant (except in Papua) and women performed most agricultural work. But kidnapping of women was also a thing among Australian Aborigines, where women's gathering supplied most of the calories. When land became scarce in more advanced societies, the incentives for kidnapping women decreased, although they didn't disappear.
Men have not only kidnapped women as wives. They have also enslaved them (and reproduced with them as slaves). And they invaded their homelands, killed or enslaved the men and reproduced with the women, as the Indo-Europeans did in Europe.
All in all, more women than men on the loser side have reproduced throughout history.
This was a long answer. But it is a very complex question.
Haha, personality certainly does play a role. The problem with anecdotes is they're not rancomized controlled trials, and we can't do rct's on our own lives. And some men have close lifelong buddies, usual formed during school years. But women are more "agreeable", which is another way of saying they're nicer on average. Seems to me that would promote social bonding. But I'm just speculating.
Interesting and not entirely convincing. My impression has been that men's relationships are often looser and more shifting. In adulthood, my relationships and those of most men I know have arisen mostly from professional situations, which often change. My wife an daughter, on the other hand, have relatively numerous strong relationships they developed in childhood through High School. Even today my wife makes new friends easily because conversations she strikes up with other women at health clubs etc. get personal fairly quickly (locker rooms seem to be fertile grounds these days but formerly mothers of kids' friends were a big source). Men's casual conversations tend to center on ritualistic discussions of sports and don't so easily transition to the personal or intimate.
Your experience may also involve personality differences - your wife sounds pretty extraverted. In contrast, Mrs. Apple Pie is an introvert, and the idea of her making new friends easily because of conversations she strikes up with other women at health clubs etc just makes me laugh.
I share some of your experiences: When it is time to socialize, Anders tends to send me forward, because it is easier for me to connect to new people and strike up conversations.
Still, he has kept in touch with three friends from school during all those years. I have lost all of my old friends, and got one back last year only after she moved back to our hometown area with a child the same age as one of my children. It is like the ritualistic nature of male friendship make is both less intense and less demanding: Females can be intimate, but also, in some sense, NEED to be intimate to be friends at all. I have the feeling males are better at being friends without being intimate.
I also suspect that men have not always been as far away from each other as here and now. There is a reason why I chose that picture: The first time I saw it, I thought the two male friends looked unmanly. Such an illustration wouldn't have passed as serious today.
Although I understand that this book changed your thinking, I suspect it still doesn't accommodate the extent to which female evolutionary pressures favored competition.
Right away in her Development of Human Female Competition: Allies and Adversaries, Benonson admits "Kin, a mate, and affines share a mother's genetic interests, whereas unrelated women constitute primary competitors." This is not such a barrier to female cooperation; women *should* be good at cooperating with other women, because, mostly, they *would* have been socialized among relatives.
But women of virtually all surviving lineages have evolved under patriliny and bride capture, which brings unrelated women together into the same society and under the same roof. Women who live among other women without sharing genes with any of them will truly experience life as fully and totally zero-sum.
Every time a bride was bought, every time a woman was won in warfare, every time a woman was kidnapped, every time a woman was simply married away to another family, the zero-sum game swallowed her completely. These conditions have pervaded humanity since deep evolutionary time. Humans have been reproducing for so long, and so extensively, under patrilineal marriage systems that girls now look with suspicion on their own sisters, and respond sexually to rope.
These last two facts are commonly spoken of among people I know, though never in the same breath. Even before I'd had children of my own, I was told emphatically that boys are hard as young children because they are rambunctious; girls are hard at puberty, when they begin to fight. I was skeptical for some years, but after extensive experience with children of all ages I can verify that this is most definitely the case. And why *would* it be the case that a girl goes through puberty and suddenly begins to fight? Because for countless generations, that was the time when her ancestors were married off, sold away, captured, or kidnapped into the zero-sum world. Those of her ancestors who responded best to this situation thrived; now the zero-sum world is baked into her genes.
On a theoretical level, Warriors and Worriers is a simple book. It presents about as much theory as in needs to frame the research, and no more. One has to fill in most theory oneself, like you are doing now. For that reason it is a very thought-provoking book.
That said, Joyce Benenson writes quite a bit about female behavior within the family. She states that female nature is only peaceful among dangerous strangers. Within the family, where women at least sometimes have some kind of value for the other members, women can be both verbally and physically aggressive.
Also, humans, unlike most primates, are virilocal, it's the young females that change groups rather than the young males. So the men in a band are likely to be more related to each other than the women are.
For me, the awareness of the book came in 2021 from recommendation (https://www.thepodcastbrowser.com/how-men-and-women-socialize-differently/) of a podcast that had originally aired in 2016. So I don't think anything happened in 2023 other than increasing willingness to discuss adversity of men in the U.S. education system (e.g., Richard Reeves' book)
I wonder if it is possible to avoid the "woke" arguments by just looking at this as a cultural legacy vs trying to frame it in evolutionary terms? It is perhaps a subtle difference - and yet the people most uncomfortable hearing tales of "innate differences" are often the most comfortable blaming the influence of out-dated cultural traditions.
If I were to commit the fallacy of using the general tendencies of a large group to explain one action by one member of the group, I would say that Benenson doesn't want to prove her mettle as an outstanding intellectual warrior (by becoming a fixture in the manosphere) but rather show herself as a productive but not threatening member of the community who is safe to have as a friend.
Ha ha, yes, she could be suspected of feminine behavior. But I think some scientists are actually productive but not threatening for real. (it is not their fault that the reality they are reporting on happens to be viewed as threatening).
Another clear and incisive article on a topic of great importance - thank you! Once we see Berenson’s thinking laid out, a lot is explained. For instance, the widespread observation that male and female performance profiles are different, with males generating more big winners and big losers while females cluster in the middle (the classic bell curve). If we know that men are fighters and risk takers because that’s how you grow the resource pile, we can understand male behaviour better. They will tend to take bigger risks and be more comfortable with creative (ie unproven) options. And if we see women competing in a zero sum game, then that’s why we have greater female competence and fewer wild risk takers on the whole. Even allowing for the historical oppression of women and ongoing sexism in society, these patterns will persist. So we need better answers than to simply insist that young men should try to be like young women.
Necessary caveat: not all men, not all women. And I strongly agree with your final point. We should strive to create a society where all men and all women are free and supported to be as creative and competent as they’re able and willing to be.
If you are an outstanding female you damn well better have good protection from the non-outstanding females who will treat you badly. (I am not saying that all not outstanding females will treat you badly, but sooner or later you will have conflict with a mob of them.)
Thank you for this review. I would like to add one point: Yes, it is our job to transcend our instincts as far as possible without becoming mentally ill, and women are productive members of our society, but in terms of the cultural spirit of today, I think it's important to start thinking about female aggression and its brutality (social exclusion is painful, as it's the equivalent of being left alone in the desert = death) and how it affects our current society, and how male aggression, which can also be brutal, opens the window to reconciliation and forgiveness (because losing a possible ally may have been a bad thing in the past). I think we could benefit from a fusion of the best of both female and male aggression by continuing to leave out the physical aggression of males but restoring the male mode of reconciliation and forgiveness and to restrict public shaming to a minimum (end cancel culture).
I am catching up on some of your older posts... A very interesting and insightful one. I would like to note that Harvard was going 'woke' back around 2004, back when I was hanging out with students there. I don't know when matters reached the faculty or the general society professors run in--if anything, I imagine it reaching them much earlier, if they had ever exited the PC-wave of the early 90s.
It is a book whose potential fans have been, however, largely pushed out of 'respectable' society, though perhaps it is also not well known because it doesn't sound *wrong* enough to excite a lot of argument, nor does it sound like it focuses on sex and beauty, which humans are rather attracted to.
Thank you for this review!
I think I should probably warn you: I can see cover photos on your paid-only posts in my feed reader despite not being a paid subscriber.
Thank you, well, they are visible on the front page too so I guess that is normal. I don't consider them confidential, although they are probably also not very interesting. Can I ask you one thing? How disturbing are they, in your opinion? I would have preferred to hide paid posts better because I'm afraid they worsen the general impression, but Substack works the way it works.
I haven't read the book and wonder how much I'm missing but this review raises many questions and concerns:
Other women are competitors for babysitting but don't other women also provide the babysitting? How is that not a net neutral factor?
For how much of prehistory were men warriors? Were there times of so few humans, Neanderthals, etc. that warring was uncommon for most? Is it true for more modern hunter gatherers?
Were prehistoric humans monogamous or polygamous? How would polygamy change the dynamics between men? How would it change competition for husbands?
Some societies are matriarchal. Some animals, such as elephants, are matriarchal. Where does that play into this?
The whole thing seems overly reductionist but of course the book might be less like that or make a stronger case. Maybe the exceptions are relatively minor but I'm not so sure. At minimum I agree there are real differences between men and women.
>>For how much of prehistory were men warriors? Were there times of so few humans, Neanderthals, etc. that warring was uncommon for most?
People might have spent very little time making war against each other during most of history. Still, if they spend ANY time in lethal conflicts against other groups they encounter, preparing for those moments is likely to be of tremendous importance. So even if prehistoric humans spent little time engaging in war, it is still likely that they adapted for between-group aggression as long as it existed at all.
>>Other women are competitors for babysitting but don't other women also provide the babysitting? How is that not a net neutral factor?
There are women and there are women. Other women of reproductive age are mostly competitors: They need a lot for their own children. Post-reproductive women, most of all maternal grandmothers, are a great resource as baby-sitters.
Recently - in a certain kind of feminist journalism - I keep coming across something I see as a positive trend.......acknowledgements that Masculinity and Femininity are complementary polarities in any sane conception of The Good Life. An acknowledgement that the relationship between a man and a woman has the potential to be the finest fruit that life has to offer. And that when things go wrong, they are often better understood as resulting from a kind of Faustian tango between the sexes than as a simple case of one sex always doing wrong by the other. All just timeless truths and plain common sense you might say - and Yes perhaps these timeless truths have ever obtained in the kitchens and bedrooms of our Western society. But they are ones that have been conspicuous by their absence in the groves of academe and in the fourth estate in recent decades. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/shall-we-dance
"[K[illing the adult men and incorporating the women and children into the group of the victors is so common that it has become an explicit norm of conduct."
Is this true, especially at the hunter-gatherer level, at which most of human evolution took place? Certainly, it's true that the fitness of victorious males is increased by incorporating captured women of childbearing age, and perhaps girls who're close to that age, into their group. But wouldn't there be an evolutionary disincentive to keep boys, who wouldn't share any of the male victors' genes, and who might later become sexual competitors with the victors' male relatives? Keeping young girls might also be contraindicated, since a girl-child would be competing for maternal resources with any children that a victor subsequently produced with their mother, and thus diminishing the fitness of those children.
This would seem to give women a stronger interest in the outcome of warfare than is suggested here. Capture in war represents more than a change from one oppressor to another; it also means the likely loss of any children that they're produced up to that time.
A very interesting question.
The Yanomamö of the Amazon rainforest, which, I believe, are the best studied horticulturalists, considered killing women in raid warfare bad form. They only kidnapped women, and at rather high rates: Among lowland Yanomamö 17 percent of women had changed owners through kidnapping one time or more (Noble Savages by Napoleon Chagnon, 57 percent of e-book).
There should be one report about Yanomamö males killing a male infant in the book on Helena Valero (unfortunately I haven't read it because it is difficult to get hold of). But normally, the Yanomamö kidnapped mothers together with their children. Why did they just not kill the children, especially the infants, like apes and monkeys and lions and horses and mice do? I don't know. But it could be a concession to the kidnapped women. They might be more eager to cooperate if their children aren't killed. Also, taking care of children was not obviously very hard work for Yanomamö men.
Other societies have been less principled against killing women in warfare. The Dugum Dani of Papua New Guinea, also horticulturalists, sometimes killed neighboring women when they tended their fields. The Dani considered it a kind of suicide for a woman to just walk to their more distant fields without cautiously looking for raiders. (I read that in a book called The Dugum Dani by Karl Heider).
One difference between the Dani and the Yanomamö was their population density. The Dugum Dani lived in a crowded environment, very close to their enemies. The Yanomamö kept many kilometers of pristine rainforest between enemy villages. I suppose that the availability of land made women more valuable along the Yanomamö - there was always land where a new woman could be placed to work.
I have read one observation of women participating in war: Escaped convict William Buckley lived among Australian Aborigines for 33 years. He reported that women participated in battles when their men gave them a signal that they were badly needed. Also the Australian Aborigines kidnapped women from each other, although they were hunter-gatherers instead of horticulturalists.
From what I have read, I have made the loose conclusion that kidnapping of women was the most common at the horticulturalist state, when land was abundant (except in Papua) and women performed most agricultural work. But kidnapping of women was also a thing among Australian Aborigines, where women's gathering supplied most of the calories. When land became scarce in more advanced societies, the incentives for kidnapping women decreased, although they didn't disappear.
Men have not only kidnapped women as wives. They have also enslaved them (and reproduced with them as slaves). And they invaded their homelands, killed or enslaved the men and reproduced with the women, as the Indo-Europeans did in Europe.
All in all, more women than men on the loser side have reproduced throughout history.
This was a long answer. But it is a very complex question.
Haha, personality certainly does play a role. The problem with anecdotes is they're not rancomized controlled trials, and we can't do rct's on our own lives. And some men have close lifelong buddies, usual formed during school years. But women are more "agreeable", which is another way of saying they're nicer on average. Seems to me that would promote social bonding. But I'm just speculating.
Interesting and not entirely convincing. My impression has been that men's relationships are often looser and more shifting. In adulthood, my relationships and those of most men I know have arisen mostly from professional situations, which often change. My wife an daughter, on the other hand, have relatively numerous strong relationships they developed in childhood through High School. Even today my wife makes new friends easily because conversations she strikes up with other women at health clubs etc. get personal fairly quickly (locker rooms seem to be fertile grounds these days but formerly mothers of kids' friends were a big source). Men's casual conversations tend to center on ritualistic discussions of sports and don't so easily transition to the personal or intimate.
Your experience may also involve personality differences - your wife sounds pretty extraverted. In contrast, Mrs. Apple Pie is an introvert, and the idea of her making new friends easily because of conversations she strikes up with other women at health clubs etc just makes me laugh.
I share some of your experiences: When it is time to socialize, Anders tends to send me forward, because it is easier for me to connect to new people and strike up conversations.
Still, he has kept in touch with three friends from school during all those years. I have lost all of my old friends, and got one back last year only after she moved back to our hometown area with a child the same age as one of my children. It is like the ritualistic nature of male friendship make is both less intense and less demanding: Females can be intimate, but also, in some sense, NEED to be intimate to be friends at all. I have the feeling males are better at being friends without being intimate.
I also suspect that men have not always been as far away from each other as here and now. There is a reason why I chose that picture: The first time I saw it, I thought the two male friends looked unmanly. Such an illustration wouldn't have passed as serious today.
Although I understand that this book changed your thinking, I suspect it still doesn't accommodate the extent to which female evolutionary pressures favored competition.
Right away in her Development of Human Female Competition: Allies and Adversaries, Benonson admits "Kin, a mate, and affines share a mother's genetic interests, whereas unrelated women constitute primary competitors." This is not such a barrier to female cooperation; women *should* be good at cooperating with other women, because, mostly, they *would* have been socialized among relatives.
But women of virtually all surviving lineages have evolved under patriliny and bride capture, which brings unrelated women together into the same society and under the same roof. Women who live among other women without sharing genes with any of them will truly experience life as fully and totally zero-sum.
Every time a bride was bought, every time a woman was won in warfare, every time a woman was kidnapped, every time a woman was simply married away to another family, the zero-sum game swallowed her completely. These conditions have pervaded humanity since deep evolutionary time. Humans have been reproducing for so long, and so extensively, under patrilineal marriage systems that girls now look with suspicion on their own sisters, and respond sexually to rope.
These last two facts are commonly spoken of among people I know, though never in the same breath. Even before I'd had children of my own, I was told emphatically that boys are hard as young children because they are rambunctious; girls are hard at puberty, when they begin to fight. I was skeptical for some years, but after extensive experience with children of all ages I can verify that this is most definitely the case. And why *would* it be the case that a girl goes through puberty and suddenly begins to fight? Because for countless generations, that was the time when her ancestors were married off, sold away, captured, or kidnapped into the zero-sum world. Those of her ancestors who responded best to this situation thrived; now the zero-sum world is baked into her genes.
Patriliny is awful.
That is all very plausible.
On a theoretical level, Warriors and Worriers is a simple book. It presents about as much theory as in needs to frame the research, and no more. One has to fill in most theory oneself, like you are doing now. For that reason it is a very thought-provoking book.
That said, Joyce Benenson writes quite a bit about female behavior within the family. She states that female nature is only peaceful among dangerous strangers. Within the family, where women at least sometimes have some kind of value for the other members, women can be both verbally and physically aggressive.
Great review! I love your connection to how you were unhappy with your social situation. I have two daughters and this is an important data point.
Great post. I put that book on my list when I read Robin's post. Still getting to it.
I'm curious if you have read this book by Cat Bohannon
https://www.amazon.com/Eve-Female-Drove-Million-Evolution/dp/0385350546
Also, humans, unlike most primates, are virilocal, it's the young females that change groups rather than the young males. So the men in a band are likely to be more related to each other than the women are.
I also admire the book. My review is here: https://www.econlib.org/library/columns/y2023/klinggender.html
I think it was one of my better reviews.
Thank you! Yes, it was good. Did that book have a revival in 2023? Robert Hanson wrote about it in 2023 too.
For me, the awareness of the book came in 2021 from recommendation (https://www.thepodcastbrowser.com/how-men-and-women-socialize-differently/) of a podcast that had originally aired in 2016. So I don't think anything happened in 2023 other than increasing willingness to discuss adversity of men in the U.S. education system (e.g., Richard Reeves' book)
Definitely interesting.
I wonder if it is possible to avoid the "woke" arguments by just looking at this as a cultural legacy vs trying to frame it in evolutionary terms? It is perhaps a subtle difference - and yet the people most uncomfortable hearing tales of "innate differences" are often the most comfortable blaming the influence of out-dated cultural traditions.
If I were to commit the fallacy of using the general tendencies of a large group to explain one action by one member of the group, I would say that Benenson doesn't want to prove her mettle as an outstanding intellectual warrior (by becoming a fixture in the manosphere) but rather show herself as a productive but not threatening member of the community who is safe to have as a friend.
Ha ha, yes, she could be suspected of feminine behavior. But I think some scientists are actually productive but not threatening for real. (it is not their fault that the reality they are reporting on happens to be viewed as threatening).
Another clear and incisive article on a topic of great importance - thank you! Once we see Berenson’s thinking laid out, a lot is explained. For instance, the widespread observation that male and female performance profiles are different, with males generating more big winners and big losers while females cluster in the middle (the classic bell curve). If we know that men are fighters and risk takers because that’s how you grow the resource pile, we can understand male behaviour better. They will tend to take bigger risks and be more comfortable with creative (ie unproven) options. And if we see women competing in a zero sum game, then that’s why we have greater female competence and fewer wild risk takers on the whole. Even allowing for the historical oppression of women and ongoing sexism in society, these patterns will persist. So we need better answers than to simply insist that young men should try to be like young women.
Necessary caveat: not all men, not all women. And I strongly agree with your final point. We should strive to create a society where all men and all women are free and supported to be as creative and competent as they’re able and willing to be.
That is an interesting point: Females might have evolved to be less outstanding because being an outstanding female was actually often negative.
If you are an outstanding female you damn well better have good protection from the non-outstanding females who will treat you badly. (I am not saying that all not outstanding females will treat you badly, but sooner or later you will have conflict with a mob of them.)
Yes. One of the most important lessons life has taught me is to never, ever underestimate the alpha females.