In my last piece I assailed the ideology-ridden nonsense purveyed by one Chelsea Conaboy with which the New York Times saw fit to afflict its readers. Typical of anti-science feminism, the piece holds that parental behavior among women is strictly a social construct imposed on female humans by a sinister Patriarchy whose goal is the oppression of women and girls. That science everywhere contradicts such absurdity went unmentioned by Conaboy who either hasn’t read it or is so intellectually dishonest that she pretends it doesn’t exist. The Times editors should be ashamed, but somehow, I doubt they are.
But far more important than my effort is that of Dr. David Geary, Curators’ Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences and the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program at the University of Missouri, and one of the world’s leading authorities on the sexes. Basically, anything Geary writes is well worth reading and I encourage readers of the Word of Damocles to do so. His book, Male, Female, is a must read for anyone interested in the realities of science on the sexes.
So it’s with great pleasure and a not-inconsiderable measure of relief that we can read his response to Conaboy in Quillette. I say “relief,” because that’s what I feel when I read a sober, sensible article that’s blissfully free of ideology. There seem to be so few of them these days.
Geary’s writing skillfully walks the line between indignation at Conaboy’s ignorance and his desire to not offend. This comes close to the beginning of his piece:
Conaboy’s goal, apparently, is to undo 200 million years of mammalian evolution, which produced maternal investment in offspring.
It’s a losing battle, both for her and for all those who publicly express their preference for ideology at the expense of science. Those others, Geary disposes of in his last paragraph:
The claims made in a virtual world of internet algorithms populated by ideological social media pundits, journalists, and gender studies professors contradicts common sense and rational analysis of real-world phenomena. This is a world of words and ideas fraught with wishes and desires that are not always tethered to reality, including many far-fetched beliefs about the number of sexes and the origins and malleability of any associated sex or gender differences… [T]here is no scientific room for the nonsensical idea that boys and girls and men and women are infinitely malleable and merely socially constructed products of the patriarchy or some other social system.
In between, Geary points out some basics, such as the fact that, if the different parenting behaviors of the sexes are social constructs, there’s no explaining why males and females across the mammal world behave much as humans do. Of course Conaboy never makes the attempt. Face it, prairie vole males don’t impose parenting on females, nor do those of any mammal species. On that alone, the woke/feminist narrative of parenting founders.
But there’s more. For example, although some cultural messages do encourage women to be mothers, they’re actually mostly an expression of our underlying biology. Because male and female brains differ, they tend strongly to respond differently to societal cues.
But nature has not left engagement in the associated behaviors to chance. Nor has it made maternal and paternal brains equally responsive to the associated experiences.
Dr. Ruth Feldman of Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv has for some years been on the cutting edge of understanding male/female differences in parenting. Geary quotes her thus:
[There is] greater amygdala activation [associated with emotions] in mothers and greater cortical activation in fathers, suggesting that the hormones of pregnancy may chart a unique limbic path to parenting in mothers, which in fathers is constructed via cortical networks and active caregiving behavior.
In other words, those parenting hormones I wrote about last time have receptors in different parts of the male and female brain – the cerebral cortex for men and the amygdala (mostly) for women. British evolutionary anthropologist, Dr. Anna Machin noted the same thing in her fine book, The Life of Dad, in which she further pointed out that, because parenting tends to occur in males in the part of the brain most recently developed (i.e., about 500,000 years ago), we can conclude that parenting is a far newer phenomenon for males than for females. Does Conaboy seriously suggest that, our male predecessors over 500,000 years ago oppressed females into caring for kids? It just makes no sense. What does make sense is that, like essentially every mammal species, pre-human females did the whole job of child care and it was only very late in the evolutionary game that males began to pitch in.
Meanwhile, Geary links to the invaluable work of Dr. Catherine Hakim that delves into the preferences expressed by the sexes for how to spend their time. Predictably, women, far more than men, prefer home and family and men prefer paid work, aka, resource provision. Remarkably, women who do prefer paid work are fully able to find it.
Importantly, most women were able to achieve these preferences. Four out of five (or 82 percent of) well-educated and work-focused women had full-time careers, whether or not they had children: “[P]atriarchal values have very little impact, and child care responsibilities have no impact at all on work rates among work-centered women.” If anything, the home-focused women were less able to realize their preferences, as many of them had to work to contribute to family finances.
In short, the Patriarchy that Conaboy finds so sinister, actually rewards the choices of work-oriented women somewhat better than it does those of their stay-at-home sisters. I wonder how she rationalizes that with her ideology. I suspect she’ll never tell us. But sensible, trustworthy people like David Geary will.
This article originally appeard at The Word of Damocles.
