Amanda Marcotte, no raving beauty she (the objective rating of her looks is germane to this discussion insofar as it partly explains the motivation for why feminists hold the irrational opinions they do), has a beef with sociobiology, aka evolutionary psychology.
I read and research a lot of “evolutionary psychology”, and while they are very good at getting people to cop to anti-feminist opinions and sexist behaviors, I have not really seen many—any?—that prove their contention that these behaviors or opinions are encoded in the genes instead of learned from the environment. They simply note people are sexist and claim that it’s genetic. I sense an agenda there, because if you were putting science in front of an agenda, you would acknowledge the huge body of research supporting the idea that we learn our behaviors and beliefs from our environment.
But I’m happy [ed: no, she’s not] to read studies that prove that sexism is genetic and unchangeable instead of socialized and changeable! I just haven’t seen it in all the years I’ve been writing about this.
Feminists are scared shitless of the implications of sociobiological theory, and it’s easy to see why. The whole edifice of feminism teeters on the shaky proposition that sex differences feminists find unpalatable are amenable to change (i.e., “improvement”) via government and societal intervention. If it is found that sex differences are instead hard-wired into the brain architecture through the process of millions of years of natural and sexual selection and are resistant to social reengineering schemes, then feminism as a practical ideology is utterly discredited.
What’s a man-jawed, fuzz-faced, beady-eyed fembot to do when her raison d’être is rendered null and void? One thing we know for certain: she won’t be happy to read studies dropping a hot, steaming deuce into her brain case.
There is a level of psychological distress more disconcerting, more bowel-evacuating, than even that of coming to realize one is hitched to a hollow ideology. Ultimately, feminists are afraid of what evolutionary psychology has to reveal because feminists are afraid of attractiveness standards, and of unchangeable attractiveness standards in particular. Because, you see, in the arena of sexual marketability, it is men who are the sex with more options to improve their dating market value. Women are, for the most part, stuck with their desirability, or lack thereof, the moment they are conceived. Outside of expensive, radical cosmetic surgery the effectiveness of which is questionable at best and monstrous at worst, the average woman will not be able to make herself more beautiful and, hence, more likely to snag a high value man anytime in her life. She can only lower her mate value by, for example, getting fat, old, burdened with bastard spawn or facially disfigured.
Accepting this truth is so depressing for many women that elaborate delusions, rationalizations and nonsensical ideologies occupy large swaths of their neural pathways to misdirect and medicate their overstuffed egos.
As the gleaming Chateau on the hill once pointed out, accurate generalizations about immutable human characteristics are the holy water to feminists’ undead orthodoxy:
if you’ll notice, women are the most outraged by the idea of evolutionary psychology and unchangeable genetic fate. that physical beauty should be so unalterable and at the same time so critical to a woman’s prospects for snagging an alpha male of her own sends shivers down her spine. if true, it means they cannot do much to improve their value on the open market. no educational attainment, no carreer success, no makeup, no exercise [to a point], no hob nobbing with the right people — nothing much matters but for the face they were given when mommy’s egg was fertilized by daddy’s swimmers.
yet, this is precisely how the sexual market works. and so, as the gears of the pretty lie machine clank and sputter to dispense more of its life-affirming self-delusions, the “social conditioning” brigade strikes out at the descending shroud of hopeless darkness.
Read Marcotte’s words. Listen to her distress signals. “Learned behaviors”. “Social conditioning”. “Cultural conditioning”. These empty slogans — so pleasant on the ears of blank slatists and equalists and temperamental bolsheviks — are the lifeblood of feminist thought. To undermine the slogans is to ling chi the souls of their adherents. Marcotte frantically and blindly swings them around like a verbal sword, not to persuade or enlighten, but to keep her encircling enemies at bay. This is argument in service to self-preservation, nothing more, for the evidence she marshals in support of her worldview is slowly rotting from the inside out. As science inexorably chips away at the justifications for believing in these feminist fairy tales, the cognitive dissonance that believers must feel rattles their confidence and sends them reeling backwards into paroxysms of strawmen, illogic, sour grapes, non sequiturs and ad hominem. The stuck pig always lashes out most violently when cornered.
Feminists will answer, with all the self-contradiction that only they can expertly dispense absent the slightest hint of irony, that sociobiology is not a hard science because we can’t go back in time to observe our ancient ancestors’ mating habits, thus relegating any theory of human mating behavior to the province of “just-so stories”. Such penetrating insight!
Well, no shit. We can’t go back in time to observe apes evolving into humans, either, so according to feminist logic that must mean the theory of evolution is wrong. Scientists gather evidence for historical biological processes by analyzing what is available to them in the present environment, and then draw inferences from the data. Additional data and experimental testing will either buttress or weaken a particular hypothesis. This isn’t just-so fantasizing; it’s the scientific method.
Sadly for Marcotte and her ilk, to date the accumulated data is buttressing a genetic view of human nature and weakening fifty years of environmental supremacy belief.
The question of evolutionary psychology’s status as a hard science is not something of much relevance. All that matters is whether or not its findings make sense. And compared to competing humanities and “soft science” fields, evolutionary psychology makes a lot of sense. It, and not “cultural conditioning” theories, best explains the patterns of human behavior anyone can see in action every day if they aren’t up to their eyeballs in denial, or striving for social status points over their SWPL frenemies.
Marcotte is insisting on cultural explanations for which there is much less evidence than there is for genetic explanations. If feminists present a theory of human behavior which explains the available evidence better than evolutionary psychology, I’ll give it its due. Of course they will not do so because they and their cohorts have nothing but lies. For example, the highly popular “stereotype threat” theory held near and dear by racial egalitarians — close cousins of feminism — has recently been proven a sham.
Even evidence that supports a cultural primacy interpretation is fraught with danger to feminist orthodoxy. For what is culture but a manifestation of genetic propensity?
Culture does not spring up out of the ground unseeded, like a summoned monolith. Human genetic disposition seeds the ground and creates culture, unleashing a macro feedback loop where culture and genes interact in perpetuity. Those “cultural judgments” you so recoil from are actually subconscious reinforcements of ancient biological truths.
If feminists find some smidgen of peer-bypassed evidence tucked away somewhere in a private school’s gender studies program that, for instance, Playboy has pushed men to value young, slender babes over the old, fat chicks men would otherwise prefer, then they will have to account for the unnerving fact that the culture *just happened* to influence men to favor slender babes over fat chicks, and not the opposite. Then they will find that most cultures across the globe mysteriously influence men to favor young, thin women over old fatties. The muddled and tormented bridging of all those coincidences into some kind of semi-coherent thought will belie their theories and rob them of any parsimony. Why does culture, if it is the primary influencing force of sexual behavior as feminists claim, almost always act in one direction on fundamental human dynamics such as mate choice? That is a question feminists dare not entertain.
So feminism, along with Communism, multiculturalism and egalitarianism, falls victim to the same tropes that all human nature denialists share: namely, the belief that people behave in upsetting ways because some nebulous cultural mind ray tells them to behave in upsetting ways.
The “blame the media” refrain is the reflexive blurt of the human nature denialists. It comes in many flavors: blame society, blame cultural conditioning, blame stereotyping, blame heteronormativity, blame subtextual bias… anything to avoid confronting the reality of evolved immutable human preferences for some traits over others. People are intolerant of obesity because it innately disgusts them, not because “the media” tells them to be disgusted. Media propaganda can make it more or less acceptable to publicly express that disgust, but it can’t create the disgust out of thin air.
One should not underestimate how convenient the feminist beliefs in gender equalism, social conditioning, and the malleability of human behavior is to the realization of their goals. Because without those beliefs, feminists won’t be able to get on with the program of altering the oscillation of the evil sexist cultural mind rays. Their worst fear will instead emerge to soak up the light of day: human nature is less alterable than they wish were so, and essential contours of our sexual preferences are heavily influenced by a universally shared genetic legacy. Where the genetic predilection for certain mate characteristics is not universally shared, it is racially or ethnically shared, and thus, just as immutable.
Contrary to the hopes and dreams of rainbow ejaculating egalitarian gasbags, what the science of evolutionary psychology and genetics tells us is that there are born winners and there are born losers, on the individual and on the population level, and you’ll have no choice but to sit back and get used to it. Since most feminists are ugly, accepting this truth would deliver a mortal blow to their egos.
This week, I will present three more of those evolutionary psychology studies that so vex feminists. Hopefully Marcotte will catch wind of them. The thought of her groaning under the weight of the anti-equalitarian evidence as her forehead vein throbs and her soul splinters into a million shards of impotent grrlrage fills me with sadistic joy.
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