Neglecting Biology Harms Women

As technology develops, one would expect that we would embrace, understand, and apply our newly gained knowledge. Of course, as most would agree, technology has been used for bad and good purposes. But a pool of knowledge regarding sex differences has grown in the past decades and we seem to increasingly pretend it does not exist. There is something so odd about how people turn their heads from it. It’s not as if you are shunning the creation of a nuclear bomb, it’s akin to discovering how exactly our brains map memories and insisting that it’s inconsequential. We know that biological differences exist between men and women, and we used to accept it. Why have we started to slip away from that general understanding? 

And I know it is not inconsequential. I’m not talking about trans people and sports, or bathrooms, or gender-affirming care. I’m talking about the pervasive consequences regarding how we view women in our liberated society. Our version of equality often seems to push women into being “proto-men.” As if being truly liberated is to pretend one should do everything like a man. We should work like men. We should approach sex like men. And our biology has consequences in spades for that philosophy. 

Sex, as one might expect, is different for men and women. I’ve recently read The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry. Throughout the book, the differences between how men and women operate, on average, are clear. My takeaway was that women are left with the lion's 

share of the consequences regarding sex. While this might seem obvious, it wasn’t just about the pregnancy risk. It’s about our emotional attachment. In most cases, men can have unattached sex and women can’t. So in a society that pressures women to embrace casual, noncommittal sex as liberating, women are left wondering what is wrong with them when it emotionally stings. Even the women who don’t want to participate are affected, as they might struggle to find men when the sexual marketplace has been perverted. It’s a dangerous precedent to set. Our generation isn’t dating, isn’t getting married, isn’t having kids, is having less sex on average (because fewer people are in relationships), is having their “firsts” later and later, consumes more explicit content, and we’re all in the throes of a mental health crisis. Something is clearly wrong with the relationship between men and women. Like many vices, trading temporary pleasure can have long-lasting effects. We would be remiss to fail to acknowledge our biology screaming back at us. While I don’t know Lily Phillips and cannot testify to her true feelings and thoughts, there is something that I cannot forget about how her interview went after she slept with 101 men in one day. I normally believe that people should embrace personal responsibility and the consequences of their choices, but her after-interview was so gut-wrenching that I cannot help but feel as if I and everyone else let her down. The expectation of sex is something we should regard carefully, as it is so intimate and susceptible to abuse. Accordingly, women cannot and should not approach sex like men. Work is a more complicated story that is intertwined with other problems, but it has ramifications for women. I have recently read Family Unfriendly by Timothy Carney and his description of what he calls ‘workism’ put the issue into perspective for me. From a young age, it’s reinforced that career achievement should be our biggest aspiration. We don’t ask a kid if he wants a big family when he grows up, we ask him what job he wants (This also plays into the idea that the only ‘work’ one does is outside the home and devalues home labor). Girls have been rolled into this ‘workism’ too. We are taught that to be happy is to achieve the most we can in our careers. If making money is your goal, you’ll win. But if fulfillment is your goal, there is more to a good life. It seems women who have kids are more fulfilled. And women want more kids than they are having on average. Telling women that the highest order of a ‘good’ life is found in a successful career not only harms women, but it also harms men. A society founded on hyper-valuing work is a sad society. Our generation is depressed and resistant to the rat-race of corporate work, maybe because that seems like that’s all our futures have in store. But there is a reason why this philosophy is especially damaging to women, and the answer is in our biology. On average, women are more attuned to people and they are more caring. I’m skeptical that this is wholly a product of socialization, as this trait is seen in female infants and across different cultures. It’s no wonder why women choose the fields they do and sometimes choose to be stay-at-home moms. It’s just a biological inclination. What is not biological inclination, however, is training women to reject and judge those who do. While there are more men than women in the field of engineering, it is not a problem of equality and should not be portrayed as such. If you reject biological differences and expect women to act the same as men and be “proto-men,” you would want to funnel more women into engineering to create 50/50. But most women don’t want those jobs. We need to allow women to pursue what they truly want to pursue, which their biological makeup will have some influence in deciding. Differences are natural. 

If being a woman is doing the same thing as men with more consequences, then what does it really mean to be a woman? And what does it mean to be a man? Identity is a complicated issue, but I also believe that turning women into “proto-men” truly hurts women and men in their sense of identity. We all need a sense of identity to ground ourselves in the world. Preferably we would have one that we don’t despise. I think it’s sad that many girls, including myself when I was younger, completely rejected the idea of liking pink. It was as if embracing any femininity would taint me and make me lesser. Such that even an arbitrary symbol of womanhood was to be scorned. After getting older, it still took me time to accept that I was a woman and that it influences me. While the validity of my arguments is not altered by my sex, the experience of living is. My hormones and physicality dictate a lot about my life and how I feel. And that's okay. We should not feel pressured to separate ourselves from our physical womanhood. It should be a beautiful part of who we are. We are women, after all, not “proto-men.” While I am not a man and do not know what it’s like to be a man, I wonder where the contortion of womanhood leaves men. Are they just left to be the aimless standard for women to simultaneously hate but compare themselves to? None of this seems good for the psyche.

Of course, averages do not mean that every single woman experiences all of these things. I’m not saying one ought to be chained to the dictates of their biology, but we surely should understand how it affects us and have care for the consequences it has in our lives. But neither should our differences be used as a crutch. Neither men nor women are ‘worse’ because of their differences. It is the philosophy that insists women should be more like men that implies this imbalance. Men and women each bring unique strengths, and their differences are what make them invaluable to one another and to society.

Author: Bellemy Morgan

The views expressed are the author's alone and do not represent the official position of the GWCRs.