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.
Ummm. The quality of the text got the ideas across. In that way it is like the science fiction I read as a teenager.
The suggestion that female human's psycholgy is more diverse than that of males is interesting. I expect somewhere there is a least one academic (likely female) psychologist who has investigated this.
I was rather distracted by wondering about Tove's genetic origins. Scandinavia was a pretty physically demanding place to live up until a generation or so ago so maybe there was selection for big strong mothers relative to the easy living of France with their impish feminine 'Amelie movie tropes'.
>Ummm. The quality of the text got the ideas across. In that way it is like the science fiction I read as a teenager.
I guess I should take that as a compliment.
>The suggestion that female human's psycholgy is more diverse than that of males is interesting. I expect somewhere there is a least one academic (likely female) psychologist who has investigated this.
I don't think it is. I think male psychology is diverse too, just like anything with males is diverse (body height and so on). I just think males are diverse for other reasons, meriting another blog post.
>I was rather distracted by wondering about Tove's genetic origins.
I have never done any geneological research or genetic analysis, but the few ancestors I know about were Scandinavians.
Thank you for writing this. As a tomboyish, mildly autistic woman, I was fortunate to grow up in the 70s and 80s when it was ok to just be a weird girl. I mean, it was difficult socially and I wondered what was wrong with me and why I had so much trouble making friends, and why girl social dynamics were so baffling to me...but no one ever suggested that having a mastectomy and taking testosterone would help.
I knew we have more female than male ancestors, but somehow I never made the connection that there was sometimes evolutionary pressure for masculine traits in females but probably never corresponding pressure for feminine traits in males (except maybe now?). It makes so much sense though.
- It's now generally acceptable for women to do about everything men do, but efforts to normalise the inverse are largely unsuccessful. This is the first coherent explanation I've seen for why this is.
- It seems like, on average, women are better at doing male things than men are at doing female things? And I don't think it's recent. I remember reading an article about a grave of warriors which the people who discovered it thought were all men, but later researchers looked at the hip bones and found that it was actually 50% women. There are also old stories about women in warrior roles (e.g. Amazons) but now that I think about it I can't come up with an example for a corresponding story about men in a female role.
There was a time in my life in which I was very unhappy with being seen as female and did everything I could to fall outside that category. Now I'm glad I didn't take any irreversible steps. Let's make tomboys great again!
“It seems like, on average, women are better at doing male things than men are at doing female things”
This makes me think about how things like fashion, makeup, interior decorating, hairstyling, etc. are usually seen as stereotypically “female” occupations, but the top fashion designers, makeup artists, interior decorators and hairstylists are often male (usually gay males). Maybe because female ability and IQ tends to be more clustered in the “average” part of the bell curve, while men have a wider dispersion? i.e., the majority of women are competent at things and there are fewer female morons and geniuses; while there are more males at both the low end and high end of ability. So when you do have men who are good at female things, they are statistically more likely to be geniuses vs. just very good.
I agree that that explains a part or all of the gender gap in top performers. Anecdotally, men are also more likely to focus obsessively on one thing than a woman of equivalent innate talent would, so I wonder if that plays a part. If it does, I suspect it is eclipsed by the effect you mentioned though.
I would imagine it does; and it seems like men in those “feminine” fields are often gay so they (in the past) usually didn’t have the added distraction of having a family and presumably could hyper focus on hairstyling or fashion design 18 hours per day.
> It seems like, on average, women are better at doing male things than men are at doing female things?
A complex issue, I think. On the one hand, selection pressures were stronger on the male side than on the female side. On the other hand, humans as a whole have developed into a more feminine direction. In a very interesting book with the bland title The Goodness Paradox, primatologist Richard Wrangham writes about how our ancestors went through a self-domestication process. That process made humans less reactively violent, and also less physically masculine with leaner limbs, flatter faces, smaller eyebrows and smaller heads, among other things. I have a very speculative theory that male homosexuality might have been a side effect of this self-domestication process. Speaking in evolutionary terms, homosexual men are obviously too feminine in their sexual preferences. Still, many of them seem to have gotten away with it and reproduced regardless. So I think there is a fair share of deviance from the imagined optimum for both sexes, but for different reasons. All in all, human males are much more feminine than the males of our cousin the chimpanzee, because they fight much less and take care of their children much more. The process that led to that development is probably much more visible in some males than in others.
Not being very feminine myself, I might not be able to fully grasp what genuinely feminine pursuits consist of. The men I have seen in the roles of daycarers and nurses have seemed as good as any. Luckily for me, there are men who possess the kind of patience that is required for childcare and cooking. I married one of them.
When it comes to female warriors, I think such occasions was driven by a high demand for warriors. In small-scale societies, the demand for warriors is huge. Girls are killed off at birth to make place for more warriors. In such an environment it makes sense to use creative means to increase the number of warriors. In modern society there is instead a lack of people taking care of other people, and males spend more time caring for children compared to in other societies.
I think the point of all this is just that biological sex is something complex. Not the XX/XY part of it, but the psychological side is. If evolutionary psychology has any role in the prevalent idea that not conforming to gender stereotypes is unhealthy, that is too bad. There have been evolutionary pressures on females to be masculine and on males to be feminine and the result is most of all an uplifting mess.
I may have to read that book, thank you for the answer.
Seems like I was mistaken about there not having been any evolutionary pressures on males to be feminine. I hadn't heard about that process you described.
That book is great! One of the most important books I have read during the last decade. It is almost strange it is not more famous, because it is kind of revolutionary.
Yes, in my experience women vary rather more than men do. There are many, many ways to be feminine, and I think this is why I have encountered half a dozen women and young ladies who want to be called he/him, and *zero* men with the same desire.
> It seems like, on average, women are better at doing male things than men are at doing female things?
There are very few skills that are truly feminine; men must negotiate through complex social relationships, cope with unpredictable emotions, prepare meals, nurture their allies back to health, and charm lovers with grace and handsomeness.
But those things which are *truly* feminine can be accomplished only barely by men, or not at all: Keeping infants fed, gestating them after conception, and birthing them into the world. In this critical regard men are utterly dependent upon women.
Well... no really not just gestation and birth. Leave aside the nutrient content of breastmilk vs. formula; I'm watching Mrs. Apple Pie get flooded with oxytocin from giving #6 "boo-bie-doo" right now. Standing around with an infant in your arms for 30 minutes at a stretch, day after day for a year and a half, *sans* oxytocin, is just extremely difficult. Maybe give the man a monster truck rally, MMA tournament, or basement poker game to watch and you can *distract* him, but he really doesn't derive that same emotional reward for doing it.
Since I seem to be indirectly discussed in this thread I might as well give my opinion.
As far as I can tell the traditional gender roles for childcare have been severely mixed up. Women regularly have an edge over men in social skills, but social skills are almost wholly wasted on an infant. Infant child care is mostly about logistics, supply rest and nutrition at correct intervals and anything else will be a breeze. Required personal qualities are patience, organization and single-mindedness, none of which is generally seen as gender-specific. In fact men have one clear advantage when caring for infants, namely upper-body strength. Infants are easily pacified by carrying. I have yet to experience an infant who is not calmed by being carried around. My infant caring strategy depends a lot on my ability to carry around infants hour after hour. Tove simply does not have the necessary physical characteristics to do something similar.
I not so sure social skills are wasted on newborns and carry around infants. Ours liked to be talked to, and also present in the room with the conversation, except when sleeping.
Also, - totally agree with the carrying around part. I did a lot of that and for the reasons you mentioned. It tended to calm them right down.
I also have the experience that infants like to hear the voice of their caregiver. However, I do not think it requires a lot of social skills. Since infants do not understand very much at all you can more or less say anything to them and they will be happy. I used to say all the letters in the alphabet over and over again to my infants in the hope that they would familiarize themselves with spoken sounds. I do not think that worked at all, but at least it gave me something to say that was so simple that I could say it while thinking of something completely different.
That's my contribution, yes: Afternoon video games, and long walks at night. In the winter the walks are a big deal considering all the bundling up that needs to be done, and I have to be willing to "take one for the team" if I hit a patch of warm ice. (My right elbow is still red from falling down while carrying #6 to the car two weeks ago.) It can be even worse when you live in an urban area and there's too much traffic to make walking safe - going around and around in the living room with a screaming baby at 3:00 in the morning takes a lot of that patience and upper body strength you're talking about. I wouldn't want to be doing any of this as a typical 65 kg female.
But *bottle-feeding* isn't just logistics; you can't go far from the kitchen there. And in the small hours of the morning it isn't always easy to comfort a baby with a cold bottle. Boo-bee-doo and an oxytocin bath for your brain is literally right there if you're a mother. For a father, bring the microwave, formula, bottle, mini-fridge, and distilled water into the bedroom, I guess?
When we had our first child, a very long time ago, I had neither experience, nor any of today's light-weight e-book readers. Instead I walked hour after hour in circles around the kitchen table with the baby in the baby carrier (or BabyBjorn as I understand they are called in America) and a book in front of me. It worked surprisingly well considering I had hardly seen an infant before having one of my own. Today I am rather more shrewd (and do not have as much time for reading) but the baby carrier is still essential equipment when handling infants. Much more so than the pram, which I regard as optional.
I am a bit surprised that a father of six has not discovered the major advantages of cold infant formula. I suppose it might not pair very well with breastfeeding. But training your infant to always accept cold formula is well-invested money. The convenience of just pulling a bottle out of the fridge is hard to beat, especially for that 3:00 feeding.
It's great when it works, for those whom it works for. Personally I would probably not volunteer to have five children if I had had to be their primary caretaker for one a and a half year. I think no amount of oxytocin would be enough to bribe me to calmly sit down with a baby, day after day, month after month. I like children a lot, but maybe not in the most typically feminine way.
Some couples have that traditional male/female complementarity and can thereby take care of small children in accordance with traditional gender roles. Others consist of individuals that nature didn't make into typical men and women this way, and we need to search for new solutions. High-tech products like infant formula is such a solution.
Would you say that a relationship between two people who skew masculine is functional for raising children, or is it better to look for a more feminine husband if you're a more masculine female?
Your experience childraising sounds very relatable to me.
Well, I wouldn't say my husband is feminine (no one who meets him would ever call him that, probably because he is not at all an outwardly soft person). But I think a certain complementarity can be beneficial. Apple Pie describes one type of complementarity. Anders and I have another. I'm restless and like to work and be efficient. He is more of the patient kind who can follow the rhythm of an infant without getting freaked out. He is also a lot better than me at waking up in the night, feeding the baby and falling asleep again. All in all, we are efficient together (or, rather, infant formula makes us efficient together).
That said, I think it is very important to have a flexible mind and not to get stuck in fixed roles. Indoor life with children around can become too much for everyone. For some reason I'm better than Anders at taking care of very fussy babies (many, although not all babies have a period of fussiness between two and four months). I have figured out how to keep such babies functional through making them eat and sleep according to a schedule. At such emergencies I have to drop everything and step in for a month or two. Then the sport is not following the baby, but gently telling a clueless baby who doesn't understand when to eat and when to sleep what to do at different moments. I guess that is why it suits my temperament better.
I'm sure two restless workaholics can raise children together too. But if any party has a more patient, less efficient state of mind, that certainly is an advantage.
> The tacit message was that tomboys like me were freaks that shouldn’t exist.
Yeah, I'm also very disappointed with the Woke attitude towards sexuality. I have my own perspective but your essay here rendered it redundant.
However, I do not agree with this:
> 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 woman would still be able to affect her reproductive success even in a male dominated environment. She could:
* impress men to secure a better mate
* encourage infanticide of the daughters of other women, rather than their own
* sabotage co-wives and competitors' reputation
* secure protection from a husband to prevent being kidnapped and separated from her children
* secure inherited resources (weapons, herds, talismans conferring social status) for their sons
* cheat on an investing man with a high status man, and not get caught
* form coalitions with women to raise the cost of sex, and deflect punishments
* smooth friction between her sons and rival men
* fastidiously attend to her diet and to dangers around her so as to improve offspring survival
There has definitely been genetic competition between females throughout history. But there has been more during some stages and less during others. In general, I think that female competition was more important when production was important for genetic selection and less important when violence was the foremost selection pressure.
I chose a violent horticulturalist society, the Yanomamö, to illustrate the latter situation. So when commenting on your list of points, I focus on the Yanomamö, which are the violent horticulturalist people I know something about because an anthropologist who studied them happened to be a capable writer:
* impress men to secure a better mate
That depends on how wives are allocated among men. Among the Yanomamö girls were often promised as future wives at very low ages. In general, they could do little themselves to influence which husband they got married to around age 12.
What they could influence themselves were their affairs. Genetic studies showed 9.1 percent of Yanomamö children had the "wrong" father. That is a lot, given the fact that Yanomamö men maimed and killed their wives for suspected or proven infidelity. The advantages of infidelity need to have surpassed the risks. The number 9.1 should come from this study.
The advantages were not only of genetic nature. As I have understood it, Yanomamö women had affairs also in order to gain protection against husbands who were violent regardless of whether there was any real infidelity going on or not. However, I don't think it seems completely unlikely that women were rather prone to infidelity for genetic reasons in a society where genes mattered more and social inheritance mattered much less.
* encourage infanticide of the daughters of other women, rather than their own
To a large extent, infanticide was a method of birth spacing. Women killed their newborns to enhance the survival chances of their still nursing existing child. There must have been a gender bias in this to cause more boys than girls in the population. But infanticide seems to have been a decision made by the individual mother, with breast milk as the primary limited resource.
* sabotage co-wives and competitors' reputation
That only helps if women compete for any important resource. If human milk is the most critically limited resource for raising more children, it can't be stolen or fought over among women (the idea of breastfeeding another woman's baby was not yet socially institutionalized).
* secure protection from a husband to prevent being kidnapped and separated from her children
Important point. But a woman's level of protection depended more on the strength of the group to which she belonged than on her individual husband. According to Napoleon Chagnon, Yanomamö women tended to take their children with them when they feared raiders and had to go outside the village. When men kidnapped women under more organized forms, during fiests, they took both the women and the children with them. I don't know why. Obviously women became happier if their children didn't die, and the burden of raising children mostly fell on women anyway. So intentionally separating mothers from children might not have been a good strategy.
* secure inherited resources (weapons, herds, talismans conferring social status) for their sons
In Malthusian societies where there are important things to inherit, definitely. In Yanomamö society, social status depended a lot on the size of one's patriline. Women could do little to influence that, except having as many sons as possible.
* cheat on an investing man with a high status man, and not get caught
Yes. When little more than genes matters, that could definitely be a winning strategy.
*form coalitions with women to raise the cost of sex, and deflect punishments
That requires the presumption that women had the power to choose whether to have sex or not. In Yanomamö society they clearly didn't. No female coalition could stand up against men with clubs and axes.
* smooth friction between her sons and rival men
If anybody listens to women, yes.
* fastidiously attend to her diet and to dangers around her so as to improve offspring survival
Yes. Only a minority of Yanomamö children had two surviving parents when they became adults. Not dying was a great thing to do for your genes. Everybody ate plantains and meat and everybody cooked their meat very well because eating bloody meat was seen as barbaric. So diet can't have had the same importance as in Malthusian societies or in modern society. Among foragers, foraging capacity was definitely a factor that made some women much more successful than others.
Ummm. The quality of the text got the ideas across. In that way it is like the science fiction I read as a teenager.
The suggestion that female human's psycholgy is more diverse than that of males is interesting. I expect somewhere there is a least one academic (likely female) psychologist who has investigated this.
I was rather distracted by wondering about Tove's genetic origins. Scandinavia was a pretty physically demanding place to live up until a generation or so ago so maybe there was selection for big strong mothers relative to the easy living of France with their impish feminine 'Amelie movie tropes'.
>Ummm. The quality of the text got the ideas across. In that way it is like the science fiction I read as a teenager.
I guess I should take that as a compliment.
>The suggestion that female human's psycholgy is more diverse than that of males is interesting. I expect somewhere there is a least one academic (likely female) psychologist who has investigated this.
I don't think it is. I think male psychology is diverse too, just like anything with males is diverse (body height and so on). I just think males are diverse for other reasons, meriting another blog post.
>I was rather distracted by wondering about Tove's genetic origins.
I have never done any geneological research or genetic analysis, but the few ancestors I know about were Scandinavians.
Thank you for writing this. As a tomboyish, mildly autistic woman, I was fortunate to grow up in the 70s and 80s when it was ok to just be a weird girl. I mean, it was difficult socially and I wondered what was wrong with me and why I had so much trouble making friends, and why girl social dynamics were so baffling to me...but no one ever suggested that having a mastectomy and taking testosterone would help.
"In 1970 anthropologist William Divale compiled the sex ratios of 112 primitive societies (sci-hub link)."
Link is missing.
Thank you! Should work now. I got the year wrong too.
That was such an illuminating post, thank you!!
I knew we have more female than male ancestors, but somehow I never made the connection that there was sometimes evolutionary pressure for masculine traits in females but probably never corresponding pressure for feminine traits in males (except maybe now?). It makes so much sense though.
- It's now generally acceptable for women to do about everything men do, but efforts to normalise the inverse are largely unsuccessful. This is the first coherent explanation I've seen for why this is.
- It seems like, on average, women are better at doing male things than men are at doing female things? And I don't think it's recent. I remember reading an article about a grave of warriors which the people who discovered it thought were all men, but later researchers looked at the hip bones and found that it was actually 50% women. There are also old stories about women in warrior roles (e.g. Amazons) but now that I think about it I can't come up with an example for a corresponding story about men in a female role.
There was a time in my life in which I was very unhappy with being seen as female and did everything I could to fall outside that category. Now I'm glad I didn't take any irreversible steps. Let's make tomboys great again!
“It seems like, on average, women are better at doing male things than men are at doing female things”
This makes me think about how things like fashion, makeup, interior decorating, hairstyling, etc. are usually seen as stereotypically “female” occupations, but the top fashion designers, makeup artists, interior decorators and hairstylists are often male (usually gay males). Maybe because female ability and IQ tends to be more clustered in the “average” part of the bell curve, while men have a wider dispersion? i.e., the majority of women are competent at things and there are fewer female morons and geniuses; while there are more males at both the low end and high end of ability. So when you do have men who are good at female things, they are statistically more likely to be geniuses vs. just very good.
I agree that that explains a part or all of the gender gap in top performers. Anecdotally, men are also more likely to focus obsessively on one thing than a woman of equivalent innate talent would, so I wonder if that plays a part. If it does, I suspect it is eclipsed by the effect you mentioned though.
I would imagine it does; and it seems like men in those “feminine” fields are often gay so they (in the past) usually didn’t have the added distraction of having a family and presumably could hyper focus on hairstyling or fashion design 18 hours per day.
> It seems like, on average, women are better at doing male things than men are at doing female things?
A complex issue, I think. On the one hand, selection pressures were stronger on the male side than on the female side. On the other hand, humans as a whole have developed into a more feminine direction. In a very interesting book with the bland title The Goodness Paradox, primatologist Richard Wrangham writes about how our ancestors went through a self-domestication process. That process made humans less reactively violent, and also less physically masculine with leaner limbs, flatter faces, smaller eyebrows and smaller heads, among other things. I have a very speculative theory that male homosexuality might have been a side effect of this self-domestication process. Speaking in evolutionary terms, homosexual men are obviously too feminine in their sexual preferences. Still, many of them seem to have gotten away with it and reproduced regardless. So I think there is a fair share of deviance from the imagined optimum for both sexes, but for different reasons. All in all, human males are much more feminine than the males of our cousin the chimpanzee, because they fight much less and take care of their children much more. The process that led to that development is probably much more visible in some males than in others.
Not being very feminine myself, I might not be able to fully grasp what genuinely feminine pursuits consist of. The men I have seen in the roles of daycarers and nurses have seemed as good as any. Luckily for me, there are men who possess the kind of patience that is required for childcare and cooking. I married one of them.
When it comes to female warriors, I think such occasions was driven by a high demand for warriors. In small-scale societies, the demand for warriors is huge. Girls are killed off at birth to make place for more warriors. In such an environment it makes sense to use creative means to increase the number of warriors. In modern society there is instead a lack of people taking care of other people, and males spend more time caring for children compared to in other societies.
I think the point of all this is just that biological sex is something complex. Not the XX/XY part of it, but the psychological side is. If evolutionary psychology has any role in the prevalent idea that not conforming to gender stereotypes is unhealthy, that is too bad. There have been evolutionary pressures on females to be masculine and on males to be feminine and the result is most of all an uplifting mess.
I may have to read that book, thank you for the answer.
Seems like I was mistaken about there not having been any evolutionary pressures on males to be feminine. I hadn't heard about that process you described.
That book is great! One of the most important books I have read during the last decade. It is almost strange it is not more famous, because it is kind of revolutionary.
Yes, in my experience women vary rather more than men do. There are many, many ways to be feminine, and I think this is why I have encountered half a dozen women and young ladies who want to be called he/him, and *zero* men with the same desire.
> It seems like, on average, women are better at doing male things than men are at doing female things?
There are very few skills that are truly feminine; men must negotiate through complex social relationships, cope with unpredictable emotions, prepare meals, nurture their allies back to health, and charm lovers with grace and handsomeness.
But those things which are *truly* feminine can be accomplished only barely by men, or not at all: Keeping infants fed, gestating them after conception, and birthing them into the world. In this critical regard men are utterly dependent upon women.
Infant formula is great. But yes, gestation is still a female specialty.
Well... no really not just gestation and birth. Leave aside the nutrient content of breastmilk vs. formula; I'm watching Mrs. Apple Pie get flooded with oxytocin from giving #6 "boo-bie-doo" right now. Standing around with an infant in your arms for 30 minutes at a stretch, day after day for a year and a half, *sans* oxytocin, is just extremely difficult. Maybe give the man a monster truck rally, MMA tournament, or basement poker game to watch and you can *distract* him, but he really doesn't derive that same emotional reward for doing it.
Since I seem to be indirectly discussed in this thread I might as well give my opinion.
As far as I can tell the traditional gender roles for childcare have been severely mixed up. Women regularly have an edge over men in social skills, but social skills are almost wholly wasted on an infant. Infant child care is mostly about logistics, supply rest and nutrition at correct intervals and anything else will be a breeze. Required personal qualities are patience, organization and single-mindedness, none of which is generally seen as gender-specific. In fact men have one clear advantage when caring for infants, namely upper-body strength. Infants are easily pacified by carrying. I have yet to experience an infant who is not calmed by being carried around. My infant caring strategy depends a lot on my ability to carry around infants hour after hour. Tove simply does not have the necessary physical characteristics to do something similar.
I not so sure social skills are wasted on newborns and carry around infants. Ours liked to be talked to, and also present in the room with the conversation, except when sleeping.
Also, - totally agree with the carrying around part. I did a lot of that and for the reasons you mentioned. It tended to calm them right down.
In my experience, singing is the best. So a small dose of musical ability doesn't hurt.
I also have the experience that infants like to hear the voice of their caregiver. However, I do not think it requires a lot of social skills. Since infants do not understand very much at all you can more or less say anything to them and they will be happy. I used to say all the letters in the alphabet over and over again to my infants in the hope that they would familiarize themselves with spoken sounds. I do not think that worked at all, but at least it gave me something to say that was so simple that I could say it while thinking of something completely different.
That's my contribution, yes: Afternoon video games, and long walks at night. In the winter the walks are a big deal considering all the bundling up that needs to be done, and I have to be willing to "take one for the team" if I hit a patch of warm ice. (My right elbow is still red from falling down while carrying #6 to the car two weeks ago.) It can be even worse when you live in an urban area and there's too much traffic to make walking safe - going around and around in the living room with a screaming baby at 3:00 in the morning takes a lot of that patience and upper body strength you're talking about. I wouldn't want to be doing any of this as a typical 65 kg female.
But *bottle-feeding* isn't just logistics; you can't go far from the kitchen there. And in the small hours of the morning it isn't always easy to comfort a baby with a cold bottle. Boo-bee-doo and an oxytocin bath for your brain is literally right there if you're a mother. For a father, bring the microwave, formula, bottle, mini-fridge, and distilled water into the bedroom, I guess?
When we had our first child, a very long time ago, I had neither experience, nor any of today's light-weight e-book readers. Instead I walked hour after hour in circles around the kitchen table with the baby in the baby carrier (or BabyBjorn as I understand they are called in America) and a book in front of me. It worked surprisingly well considering I had hardly seen an infant before having one of my own. Today I am rather more shrewd (and do not have as much time for reading) but the baby carrier is still essential equipment when handling infants. Much more so than the pram, which I regard as optional.
I am a bit surprised that a father of six has not discovered the major advantages of cold infant formula. I suppose it might not pair very well with breastfeeding. But training your infant to always accept cold formula is well-invested money. The convenience of just pulling a bottle out of the fridge is hard to beat, especially for that 3:00 feeding.
It's great when it works, for those whom it works for. Personally I would probably not volunteer to have five children if I had had to be their primary caretaker for one a and a half year. I think no amount of oxytocin would be enough to bribe me to calmly sit down with a baby, day after day, month after month. I like children a lot, but maybe not in the most typically feminine way.
Some couples have that traditional male/female complementarity and can thereby take care of small children in accordance with traditional gender roles. Others consist of individuals that nature didn't make into typical men and women this way, and we need to search for new solutions. High-tech products like infant formula is such a solution.
Would you say that a relationship between two people who skew masculine is functional for raising children, or is it better to look for a more feminine husband if you're a more masculine female?
Your experience childraising sounds very relatable to me.
Well, I wouldn't say my husband is feminine (no one who meets him would ever call him that, probably because he is not at all an outwardly soft person). But I think a certain complementarity can be beneficial. Apple Pie describes one type of complementarity. Anders and I have another. I'm restless and like to work and be efficient. He is more of the patient kind who can follow the rhythm of an infant without getting freaked out. He is also a lot better than me at waking up in the night, feeding the baby and falling asleep again. All in all, we are efficient together (or, rather, infant formula makes us efficient together).
That said, I think it is very important to have a flexible mind and not to get stuck in fixed roles. Indoor life with children around can become too much for everyone. For some reason I'm better than Anders at taking care of very fussy babies (many, although not all babies have a period of fussiness between two and four months). I have figured out how to keep such babies functional through making them eat and sleep according to a schedule. At such emergencies I have to drop everything and step in for a month or two. Then the sport is not following the baby, but gently telling a clueless baby who doesn't understand when to eat and when to sleep what to do at different moments. I guess that is why it suits my temperament better.
I'm sure two restless workaholics can raise children together too. But if any party has a more patient, less efficient state of mind, that certainly is an advantage.
> The tacit message was that tomboys like me were freaks that shouldn’t exist.
Yeah, I'm also very disappointed with the Woke attitude towards sexuality. I have my own perspective but your essay here rendered it redundant.
However, I do not agree with this:
> 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 woman would still be able to affect her reproductive success even in a male dominated environment. She could:
* impress men to secure a better mate
* encourage infanticide of the daughters of other women, rather than their own
* sabotage co-wives and competitors' reputation
* secure protection from a husband to prevent being kidnapped and separated from her children
* secure inherited resources (weapons, herds, talismans conferring social status) for their sons
* cheat on an investing man with a high status man, and not get caught
* form coalitions with women to raise the cost of sex, and deflect punishments
* smooth friction between her sons and rival men
* fastidiously attend to her diet and to dangers around her so as to improve offspring survival
There has definitely been genetic competition between females throughout history. But there has been more during some stages and less during others. In general, I think that female competition was more important when production was important for genetic selection and less important when violence was the foremost selection pressure.
I chose a violent horticulturalist society, the Yanomamö, to illustrate the latter situation. So when commenting on your list of points, I focus on the Yanomamö, which are the violent horticulturalist people I know something about because an anthropologist who studied them happened to be a capable writer:
* impress men to secure a better mate
That depends on how wives are allocated among men. Among the Yanomamö girls were often promised as future wives at very low ages. In general, they could do little themselves to influence which husband they got married to around age 12.
What they could influence themselves were their affairs. Genetic studies showed 9.1 percent of Yanomamö children had the "wrong" father. That is a lot, given the fact that Yanomamö men maimed and killed their wives for suspected or proven infidelity. The advantages of infidelity need to have surpassed the risks. The number 9.1 should come from this study.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajpa.1330420105
The advantages were not only of genetic nature. As I have understood it, Yanomamö women had affairs also in order to gain protection against husbands who were violent regardless of whether there was any real infidelity going on or not. However, I don't think it seems completely unlikely that women were rather prone to infidelity for genetic reasons in a society where genes mattered more and social inheritance mattered much less.
* encourage infanticide of the daughters of other women, rather than their own
To a large extent, infanticide was a method of birth spacing. Women killed their newborns to enhance the survival chances of their still nursing existing child. There must have been a gender bias in this to cause more boys than girls in the population. But infanticide seems to have been a decision made by the individual mother, with breast milk as the primary limited resource.
* sabotage co-wives and competitors' reputation
That only helps if women compete for any important resource. If human milk is the most critically limited resource for raising more children, it can't be stolen or fought over among women (the idea of breastfeeding another woman's baby was not yet socially institutionalized).
* secure protection from a husband to prevent being kidnapped and separated from her children
Important point. But a woman's level of protection depended more on the strength of the group to which she belonged than on her individual husband. According to Napoleon Chagnon, Yanomamö women tended to take their children with them when they feared raiders and had to go outside the village. When men kidnapped women under more organized forms, during fiests, they took both the women and the children with them. I don't know why. Obviously women became happier if their children didn't die, and the burden of raising children mostly fell on women anyway. So intentionally separating mothers from children might not have been a good strategy.
* secure inherited resources (weapons, herds, talismans conferring social status) for their sons
In Malthusian societies where there are important things to inherit, definitely. In Yanomamö society, social status depended a lot on the size of one's patriline. Women could do little to influence that, except having as many sons as possible.
* cheat on an investing man with a high status man, and not get caught
Yes. When little more than genes matters, that could definitely be a winning strategy.
*form coalitions with women to raise the cost of sex, and deflect punishments
That requires the presumption that women had the power to choose whether to have sex or not. In Yanomamö society they clearly didn't. No female coalition could stand up against men with clubs and axes.
* smooth friction between her sons and rival men
If anybody listens to women, yes.
* fastidiously attend to her diet and to dangers around her so as to improve offspring survival
Yes. Only a minority of Yanomamö children had two surviving parents when they became adults. Not dying was a great thing to do for your genes. Everybody ate plantains and meat and everybody cooked their meat very well because eating bloody meat was seen as barbaric. So diet can't have had the same importance as in Malthusian societies or in modern society. Among foragers, foraging capacity was definitely a factor that made some women much more successful than others.
Wow, you really do know about the Yanomamö; I'll give a more thorough reply after I've had a chance to check this more deeply.
Saw the title. Instant like. Tomboys disappeared from the vernacular some time ago and that's a shame.
Yes. Some words deserve to be revived.