The tomboy manifesto

Trans ideology implicitly describes tomboys as an aberration that needs to be fixed. It is wrong. Tomboys are as old as humanity itself, and we are here to stay.

Woman doing acetylene welding in cylinder water jacket, 1918. Photo by War Industry Board, United States. Wikimedia Commons

Half a year ago I wrote about male homosexuality and why it probably wasn't as much of an issue as it seems in evolutionary terms. Being a homosexual was not ideal when it came to fathering and bringing up children. But it was often good enough. That fact greatly reduced natural selection against homosexual men.

It is the same thing with a group to which I belong myself: The tomboys. Throughout human history and beyond, nature put different selection pressures on males and females. That made the psychology of the average man slightly different from the psychology of the average woman. There is a continuum of psychological properties with overlapping curves. A certain share of females will always be more on the masculine side than the average male and a certain share of males will be more to the feminine side than the average female. 

A visual representation of the psychological trait Emotionality in males and females, from the Hexaco personality test. Graph borrowed from Things to Read by Apple Pie

Not so simple

It sounds very simple. But it isn't. Yes, evolution made the average male and the average female differently. But it also put a lot more selection pressure on the male side. We have much fewer male ancestors compared to female ancestors. Many more men than women were weeded out. 

In Malthusian societies where land is the number one scarce resource, both females and males compete intensely for the resources that make reproduction possible. Women who manage to get married to rich men can have more than ten surviving children. At least some of those children will inherit land that can support their production of grandchildren. Women who marry less well will only be able to raise a few surviving children. Those children will have little to inherit to raise grandchildren. Some women will not be able to marry at all, because no man with enough resources will ask them to. That way, in highly Malthusian societies, selective pressure on the male and female sides converge quite a bit (although not totally, even in Western societies today there are slightly more mothers than fathers because of serial polygyny).

In violent, pre-Malthusian societies, selection pressures skewed much more to the male side. In such societies, the scarce resource is not land, but females (I wrote more about such societies here). Groups of men constantly fight each other over women. To be successful in that game, they, paradoxically, need to raise fewer girls than boys because only boys will be warriors themselves. In 1976 anthropologist William Divale compiled the sex ratios of 112 primitive societies (sci-hub link). Among people practicing war he noticed a high male surplus among young people, which he ascribed to sex-selective infanticide. The practice of sex-selective infanticide reduces competition between those females who are left to live. More or less all of them will get married and breed to their physical maximum. That maximum is about six children, since the children must be breastfed for several years when there are no milking cattle. For example among the Yanomamö of the Amazon rainforest, all females got married at about age 12 and went on to have about the same number of children each. At the same time, differences between men were astounding. Some men had fifty children, others had none.¹ 

That way, a woman's number of grandchildren was highly dependent on the success of her sons. That made female reproductive success into something of a lottery. Since male reproductive success was most of all a question of mentality and risk-taking, mothers couldn't do much to make their sons successful. Men mostly didn't inherit the right to several wives from their fathers, but had to earn their wives through bartering, leadership positions, kidnapping or simple terror. Except for fostering a level of fierceness and self-assurance in her sons, a woman could do little to get unusual numbers of grandchildren in such an environment.

A tilt towards the masculine

If a woman's evolutionary success is most of all dependent on the behavior of her sons, her genes will gain from being more masculine than what would be optimal for her personal situation. If a gene creates he-men on the male side and tomboys on the female side, that gene will probably multiply in an environment with high male selection pressure. Since females reproduce regardless, quite a lot of maladaptation can be tolerated on the female side. Gender oppression certainly helps too. Since females were oppressed by males, their inclinations were less important than those of males. In a society where females are free to make few choices, breeding daughters who would make the right choices if they ever got to make any important choice makes little sense.

All in all, in an environment where general evolutionary selection pressure is much stronger on the male side, that selection pressure spills over to the female side to the degree that females are actually selected primarily for male virtues. That makes the whole population skew towards the male optimum. Especially on the psychological side. Yes, there is a distinct female psychology. But it is not as strong and as prevalent as it should be. Females are, on average, a bit maladapted to their circumstances compared to males. Just imagining how females should be and assume they are that way doesn't work. They are probably much more the way men should be. 

The above is only true for properties that are advantageous in a certain sex. It is not true of properties that are essential. In evolutionary terms, dying in childbirth is not a good idea. If a too masculine build leads to childbearing difficulties, it will be selected against also in a population where all women who live to a certain age have approximately the same number of children. What is not very much selected for in such environments is what is nice to have, but not necessary to have for a woman.

The hourglass game

The nice-to-have-but-not-necessary-to-have properties are probably to a large extent psychological. But there is also at least one such physical, and thereby objectively measurable property: The celebrated waist-hip ratio. Wikipedia tells that since the subject was lifted in the 1990s, researchers have dubbed a 0.7 waist-hip ratio an ideal: In studies of male preferences, males on average tend to prefer pictures of women with a 0.7 waist-hip ratio. Studies of fertility have concluded that women with a waist-hip ratio of about 0.7 have fewer fertility problems than women with higher ratios.

And still, when researchers measure real-life women, they almost always average higher than 0.7. A 2008 study by anthropologist Elizabeth Cashdan compiled samples of waist-hip ratios from different parts of the world (sci-hub link). A Mongolian sample of young women averaged 0.73, a sample of young European women 0.75 and a sample of young overweight Polynesian women averaged 0.77. All other samples, also those of young and normal weight women, were close to or more than 0.8: Young normal weight Guatemalan women averaged 0.91, young normal weight Iranian women averaged 0.8, young normal weight Andaman forager women averaged 0.82.

Elizabeth Cashdan points out that being highly fertile and attractive is not everything for women who live under harsh conditions. She writes:

"A low WHR will enhance a woman’s fecundity and will probably (in most societies) help her to attract a desirable mate, but these are first steps only. Her fitness also depends on her ability to procure resources and help her children to be reproductively successful. Rarely can a woman depend solely on an investing man or even other allomothers to do this for her; she must also depend heavily on her own competitive efforts."

Cashdan writes that cortisol and androgens both increase waist-hip ratios and more typically masculine traits like strength, toughness, and competitiveness. Cashdan reasons that in more sedentary societies, where men do more of the heavy work, a waist-hip ratio signaling higher fertility might be optimal. However, in tougher environments women might need more of typically masculine traits to be able to fend for themselves. 

A more mundane explanation that Cashdan doesn't mention is that women who need to fend for themselves need to be good at walking, and bigger hips and buttocks make walking less efficient. Cashdan also doesn't mention the possibility that it might have been a higher selection pressure on the female side that caused waist-hip ratios to decrease in highly Malthusian societies in Europe and East Asia. But I think that should be a factor too. Almost all traits are inherited both on the male and the female side. It could be that in societies where male reproductive competition highly surpasses female reproductive competition, those aggressive, assertive and politically competitive men who manage to have many children sire daughters who inherit their traits, including the hormonal levels associated with rather narrow hips. And no one thinks of discriminating against those daughters, because in societies where women are scarce and perform most subsistence labor all women are appreciated.

Although a low waist-to-hip ratio is a physical property that is nice to have but not necessary to have, I think most such properties are of the psychological kind. Overall, physiology is much more compelling than psychology. We have no genes from females who were physically unable to give birth and few genes from females physically unable to breastfeed. Psychological traits, on the other hand, can be negotiated with quite a bit. Oppression can make humans act against their psychological inclinations. Humans also have outstanding abilities for adaptation and long-term thinking. Also mothers who were not ideally suited for the maternal role could do what it took to raise children and sometimes raise unusually well-adapted sons as a result. 

That way, there are probably many more females who have rather male-like psychologies than females with male-skewed bodies. All over the world, human females walk around looking as female as any, but with personalities that would be much more typical in a male.

Stop oppressing the tomboys! 

Society's appreciation of those females has varied. For most of history, it just didn't care, because people were supposed to follow their social role rather than their psychological inclinations anyway. 

During the 20th century, mortality decreased rapidly all over the world. The victories of modern medicine meant that keeping people alive became an alternative to producing high numbers of new people. Thus the production of people, a female specialty, became less in demand. Step by step, Western society recognized that traditionally female virtues were not enough to keep women busy. So step by step, traditionally male virtues associated with productive workers came to be more and more appreciated also in females. When society needed less breeding and more labor, tomboyish behavior became increasingly accepted. 

Radical feminism went the farthest in that direction. It made the tomboy an ideal for all women to follow. Females and males were actually alike, radical feminism explained, only outdated social expectations made us different. However, far from everyone agreed. When evolutionary psychology came more in vogue in the 1990s, it became a thankful explanation to what many people felt and observed: that there were psychological differences between males and females after all.

In its crudest form, evolutionary psychology was used to propagate the idea that people's feelings could be reliably predicted from their anatomy. I'm old enough to have experienced it myself. When I was young, in the early 2000s, it happened that some stupid person who had read a newspaper article tried to convince me that since I looked female, I surely felt x or y or z. I answered them by claiming, with pretended seriousness, that in fact, I was a man, I only happened to look like a woman. From my point of view, it was a funny thought experiment. And people looked just adequately shocked.

In the 2010s, it wasn't funny anymore. What had been something between a joke and a thought experiment for me, was a dead serious matter for people a decade or two younger than me. A new generation of feminists started to advance the idea that one's outer sexual characteristics need to match one's personality. If they didn’t match something was wrong and had to be corrected. The tacit message was that tomboys like me were freaks that shouldn’t exist.

The development is just as deplorable as unexpected. Before the 2010s, feminism was the most fierce and relentless defender of tomboys. Then it just made a 180 degree turn and became our number one enemy. There are still feminists who defend tomboyism, but the feminist movement at large has disappeared in a cloud of gender ideology.

Luckily, society as a whole has been so much affected by the idea of gender equality that we can live without a feminist movement. Most people see females engaging in traditionally male pursuits as a sign of an open-minded society and thereby something to celebrate. Few people actually frown at a woman behaving in unfeminine ways. Trans ideology aside, I think living conditions for tomboys are better than ever in our society. 

I also think the dating market is in favor of tomboys. Many heterosexual men prefer a partner who shares their male-typical interests. In a tomboy they can get both the kind of sexual partner they prefer and a like-minded companion. Not every man would think that is a great deal. But probably many enough to make the dating market for tomboys better than the dating market for women with more typically feminine personalities.

To every girl and woman who finds out she has a personality that skews to the male type, I say: Congratulations! Being a tomboy is one of many great ways of being human. If people just stop attacking tomboys' right to the bodies nature gave us, we have every opportunity to do great in modern society. 

A small poll: Was the above text as readable as previous posts I have written on similar themes? I'm asking because Anders just resigned from the post as my editor due to a feeling of hopelessness over my writing style. He asked me to arrange a poll in order to ask our readers whether he is actually needed as the careful editor of my sprawling prose. Please vote in the mini-poll below. 

1. The above text is readable enough. Anders can do something funnier than re-writing Tove's texts. 

2. This was significantly less readable than usual. Please bring the editor back! 

1. Napoleon Chagnon, Life Histories, Blood Revenge, and Warfare in a Tribal Population, 1988, sci-hub link