Both sexes have to be oppressed

Kind of a book review of Warriors and Worriers by Joyce Benenson

Many books are interesting and teach me new facts. A very small number of books completely alter my train of thought. Reading them is like encountering a fork in the road. I have to throw away everything I was writing, because I have seen the light.

This time the light in question came from the book Warriors and Worriers - Survival of the Sexes by Joyce Benenson (2014). It presents its subject in all simplicity: The evolutionary psychology of men and women. The book consists of two parts: First a compilation of research on boys and men, concluding that human males have primarily evolved to cooperate militarily. Then a compilation of research on girls and women, concluding that human females have primarily evolved to make sure that they themselves and their children stay healthy and that their families have enough resources. 

It is a simple book, lacking stylistic frills. It doesn't need them, because it has something much better and rarer: New ideas and the courage to present them uncovertly. 

One of Benenson's main findings is that males and females are prosocial and antisocial according to different patterns. Males tolerate each other better than females because they are brothers in arms. When they are attacked, or attacking another group of men, they will need every man. For that reason, males don't exclude other males for the sake of it. They exclude and bully males who seem to be bad warriors and thereby useless in the collective pursuit of war. But they accept every man who is fit for the task. They also tolerate and even like males stronger and more successful than themselves, because such a male is good to be allied with when the war comes.

Females, on the other hand, live in a zero-sum world of constrained resources. They don't benefit from living in a group with more females. Every other female is a competitor for the resources all reproducing females need: Food, babysitters and protection.

Other, unrelated females will always be there. But their numbers can be reduced through social exclusion. If a number of females gang up on one female, she will be less able to claim resources for herself and her children. Females can be the victims of social exclusion because they stand out in any sense: Too openly competitive, too successful or simply an easy target unlikely to retaliate. 

Since males cooperate in war, males benefit from the excellence of other males. Males are both allies and competitors. Females are mostly competitors. They don't benefit from the excellence of other females. So a female who seems better than others in any sense risks being attacked by other females.

This environment makes females afraid of showing any competitiveness toward unrelated females. On the surface, females act in egalitarian ways. Every time a female succeeds in anything, she needs to downplay her own success and explain it away with pure luck. In reality, females do compete. Everything else would be against nature: The genes of those who competed survived better. But there is one excellent way of hiding one's competitiveness from others: To hide it from oneself. Girls and women tend to genuinely think that they themselves do not compete. But they also think that other females compete with them. 

The whole situation of covert competition makes female friendship precarious. Two unrelated reproductive-age women both need resources and support for their own children. They both require more than the other wants to give. A female ally is nonetheless good to have. But she is also a threat. If a female friend is allowed to come close, she can take advantage of the situation and steal her friend’s resources. Most of all, she could steal her husband. She might also change sides and gang up on her former friend with other women. For that reason, women need to constantly show each other their vulnerabilities in order to trust each other. Female friends talk intimately about their families and personal whereabouts and emotions. That kind of openness is a way for women to trust each other, in spite of their good reason not to. They have so little to gain and so much to lose from each other's company, that they need to bare their throats in order to nonetheless build alliances with unrelated women. 

It's getting personal 

I can't really summarize Joyce Benenson's findings. Genuinely novel insights need the space of a book to be explained. As I read the book, I was surprised that this book is not better known. The book was published in 2014, and I still didn't learn about it until now, although I'm one of the people most interested in the subject on this planet. Thank you Robin Hanson for writing about it. 

Warriors and Worriers changed my perception of the world a bit, both on an intellectual and personal plan. First of all, I finally got the answer to why growing up female was such an unpleasant experience. 

I consider myself a person with an unusual tendency to be happy. And still, I largely felt unhappy with my social situation when I grew up. Sometimes I was the target of outright social exclusion. But mostly I just wasn't well liked. Spending day after day, year after year with people who actually didn't like me took its toll - I believe that such a situation is among the most common causes for all categories of people to be unhappy. I went to school with the probably entirely correct feeling of not being seen as a net positive.

Joyce Benenson's book told me that such an experience is very common. Girls are not well liked in general. Boys don't like them. Until boys start to develop an interest in girls as sexual objects, they tend to avoid and despise girls, Joyce Benenson writes. This fits with my own experience. When I was a girl 30 years ago, it was seen as completely natural that boys despised girls. (But I also observe that some things might have changed a little. I have four sons, three of whom are old enough to express their opinions. None of them have expressed any negative opinions of girls and they have female as well as male friends.)

Girls don't like each other that much in general. They try to create relationships that mimic the life-long relationships a woman needs to get assistance in child-rearing. And they mostly fail, because they don't share each other's interests to that degree. 

Being a girl was unpleasant for me because… being a girl is actually unpleasant. That was kind of a surprising conclusion. The kind of conclusion one doesn't make every day or every year. 

It's getting theoretical too

Joyce Beneson's theories fit perfectly with my experience of life. They also fit perfectly with some of my theories. 

For a long time I have been thinking that group selection is stronger on the male side than on the female side. In wars it happens that everyone is slaughtered: Men, women and children. But only killing 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. Wherever there is enough space to gather or grow food, men tend to spare the women and reproduce with them. In very simple societies, female captives don't even always get lower status than inborn females - all females have low status anyway. 

This, I have thought, should mean that group loyalty should have evolved less on the female side. Being in the winning group meant everything for men, but less than everything for reproductive-age women. This could explain the differences in mindsets between young men and women, I have thought. 

Joyce Benenson has reached the same conclusion, but without focusing as much on warfare. Benenson just focuses on the fact that men make war and die in wars while women and children stay in relative safety. That alone gives the sexes different perspectives. The men are busy acquiring more resources or defending what they have acquired. The women are stuck in the zero-sum world of what the menfolk can acquire. Regardless of how much productive land the men can get hold of and how many women they have to populate the land with, the women themselves can do little else than fighting silently over those resources between themselves. Together the men can increase the size of the cake, if they are lucky, determined, brave and cooperative. It's difficult and hazardous, but there is a chance of great success. On the female side, there is no such upside from intense cooperation. 

Oppress us all! 

Joyce Benenson's book made me pose that most politically incorrect question: Is gender equality a mistake? Was female suffrage actually a bad idea? A hundred years ago, many people claimed that women belong in the family, not in society at large. And now a psychologist has concluded that women have their loyalties in their families more than men and thereby are less prosocial and altruistic with society as a whole. Does that actually make societies run by men better?

After a few moments of thought, I believe that is the wrong question to ask. Comparing male and female nature misses the point: That the (extremely difficult) task of rising a bit above nature is the point of civilization as a whole. The point of cultural evolution is to create something more advanced than nature: more advanced than human nature, male nature and female nature. 

Nature is the baseline, shared by all human populations. It is how to rise over that baseline that is the important question that we all should be working at. The baseline differs a bit between males and females on average. But since the point is rising over it, discussing which sex has the lowest baseline is meaningless. 

Gender equality means equal opportunities to participate in the strivings of the human race to surpass its own nature. Warriors and Worriers is one of the few books that take us closer to that goal. 

Why is this book so unknown? 

When I read Warriors and Worriers, I wondered very much why this book is so unknown. Why isn't it on everyone's lips in the intellectual manosphere?

After reading more about Joyce Benenson, my guess is: Because its author doesn't want it to be. Joyce Benenson is a respectable person: She works at Harvard University. In 2023, she wrote this article, which I found to be of little value except for one important piece of information it conveys: Joyce Benenson is actively trying to navigate inside the Woke window.

Warriors and Worriers was published in 2014. That is, before Woke got hold in America. Rather than a brave political and philosophical statement, Warriors and Worriers probably was just top-notch science. A researcher spent her whole career on an issue. She read everything, conducted her own experiments and then analyzed the data. She happened to have the kind of razor sharp and logically functioning mind that just doesn't get distracted by fluff. The result was great science, summarized in a book. 

This great science could become famous. But only among unrespectable, anti-woke people. Not being famous might be better than promoting a book on such arenas. Especially as I strongly suspect that Joyce Benenson was never out to provoke from the beginning. Her book is remarkable in its simplicity. It is matter-of-factly. Some people are very good scientists but much less talented in the political side of what they are doing (I think Napoleon Chagnon was another good example of this phenomenon).

So I say: Read Warriors and Worriers. Foremost as one of very few good observations of female nature. But also as a document of a bygone era, when also politically sensitive areas could tolerate science for the sake of science. 

Men can also be close friends. Illustration to Robert Burns' poem Auld Lang Syne by J.M. Wright and Edward Scriven, about 1841, Wikimedia Commons