Lovers, Scientists, And Other Animals: An Interview With Mari Ruti

by Julia Cooper

I have long wondered why, when it comes to love, humans allow themselves to be compared to chimpanzees. There are countless self-help polemics and dating advice columns for the lovelorn with names like “Sexual Selection and the Dating Jungle” or “The Biology of Attraction” that take a Darwin Knows Best approach to love and relationships. In magazines like Men’s Health we learn that guys are programmed to chase younger women and cheat on their partners because, just like animals, sowing their seed as far and wide as possible is what drives them. We hear that lady chimps too only care about reproduction (broads don’t even like sex!), and when they are “finicky” during ovulation, it is a way of warding off bad mates. Apparently, men and women alike could take cues from these hard-nosed “scientific” facts.

There are, of course, innocuous dramatizations of our likeness to animals in the wild — think of the cafeteria scene in Mean Girls when a teenaged Lindsay Lohan bemoans the passive aggression of high school and imagines settling a feud over a boy with her rival as they would in the animal world. Lohan lunges for the taunting girl’s jugular over the cafeteria table, screeching like an ape as her peers bat their chests, hiss, and hoot in primal encouragement. We are, after all, animals.

Be that as it may, most analogies are not as tongue-in-cheek. At best, evolutionary arguments for why men and women are different are totally useless; at worst, they insist on a (purportedly scientific) rigid gender divide. Self-help manifestos for the single girl suggest, for example, that like our primate cousins, women are more sexually reticent, more caring, and looking for stability over satisfaction. Women must finagle their way into a healthy relationship by hoodwinking a man’s hardwiring. Self-improvement guides like He’s Just Not That Into You warn women that unless a man pursues them with a rabid persistence, they are wasting their precious biological time.

It’s not like we turn to our primate cousins for tips on how to become more efficient in our work lives, or how to sustain long-term friendships, or how to cope with existential panics. Somehow, when it comes to sex, we are lead to believe by pop psychology and science that our evolutionary histories lay out in plain detail — for anyone with scientific curiosity to see — the intricacies of the complex patterns of sex, desire, and relationship that we struggle with. Nope. You lost me.

So I turned to Mari Ruti to help make sense of it. Ruti is a professor of critical theory and gender studies (and current visiting faculty at Harvard) and she isn’t really one to dole out advice. In fact, she kind of hates self-help literature, or at least the kind of Barnes & Noble pulp that compares us — in our most naked and intimate moments — to chimps (turns out the comparison is usually to the less gender egalitarian society of the orangutan — my bad, chimps. Also, do yourself a favor and google “bonobos” like right now).

Like me — but more eloquently and well-researched — Ruti takes issue with the cultural narratives that reduce human behavior and our interior lives to mere re-enactments of the animal kingdom. In her new book, The Age of Scientific Sexism: How Evolutionary Psychology Promotes Gender Profiling and Fans the Battle of the Sexes, she takes aim at the most vocal proponents of these reductive gender scripts. Spoiler: she nails them to the wall for their Victorian ideals of femininity and poor logic. It’s a delight.

She knows a thing or three about love and what Hannah Arendt enigmatically named “the human condition.” Ruti is the author of eight books whose focus ranges from Lacanian psychoanalysis and subjectivity (The Singularity of Being), to psychic life and autonomy (The Call of Character), to anti-self-help reflections on love (The Case for Falling in Love). She sat down with me one Sunday morning to talk about the inherent violence that evolutionary psychology promotes between the sexes and her hope that women will be pissed off when they find out how bogus this “science” of the sexes is.

You argue that, whether it realizes it or not, evolutionary psychology is protecting a very conservative social mythology about human sexuality. What do you mean when you say that we are living in an age of scientific sexism?

Science is being used to legitimize sexism. What is striking about the current cultural moment is that evolutionary psychology is going against the tide of social and cultural change. Otherwise, notions of female sexuality have changed tremendously in the last couple of decades. No one else in our society thinks that women are inherently asexual and devoid of sexual feelings and desires. Evolutionary psychology is grounding a very conservative ideology that otherwise might fall away in our society, but is upheld precisely because there is this notion that it has scientific validity. In my book, I argue that evolutionary psychology’s arguments about female sexuality have no scientific validity.

Your main beef with evolutionary psychology is that the core argument ignores the cultural and political strides made by feminism and the women’s liberation movement, and attempts to drag women back to the gender norms of the 1950s — what are some of these stereotypes that evolutionary psychology thrives on?

The foremost among these is that women are asexual beings compared to men: men want sex always and everywhere; they are (as I put it in the book) willing to have sex with a telephone poll, but women have to be pulled kicking and screaming into the bedroom because they are intrinsically resistant to sex. According to evolutionary logic, there is something advantageous to women resisting men, and so there is this idea of the “coy female” that wars against pretty much everyone else’s conception of female sexuality these days. It’s difficult to look around and still claim that women have no sexual desire, it just seems like a ludicrous notion [laughs]. Yet evolutionary psychology is holding onto this notion with a stubborn perseverance.

Some of the other stereotypes that the field perpetuates are similar to what you would find in a self-help book aimed at women. They perpetuate the idea that men are programmed to stray and women are programmed to be faithful; men will go out into the world and be active, while women are reproductive — all of these age-old stereotypes that we’ve known for centuries, but elsewhere in society are falling apart. But evolutionary psychology is very keen for everyone to know that these are scientifically grounded gender differences rather than the result of socialization.

The name that you give this kind of stereotypical thinking is “gender profiling” — what are the dangers of it? Because it’s not just absurd, there is something insidious in this mode of thought.

You’re right, there is something intrinsically violent about this way of going about understanding human beings. I start from the premise that humans are singular, unique creatures and that to be able to relate to other people you have to appreciate their singularity. So when you approach people from the perspective of “men are this way” and “women are that way,” what you’re actually doing is reducing the complex psychological, historical, and unconscious reality of the person to this cartoonish stereotype based on the fact that she happens to have a vagina and not a penis. I mean, that is not only ludicrous but also incredibly violent in terms of not respecting the complexity of human life and relationships.

What really bothers me about this literature (and self-help literature) is this idea that when a couple has difficulty relating to each other, it’s all because of their gender. This doesn’t make any sense. Any two people are going to have trouble relating regardless of their gender because they are coming from different historical backgrounds and they have different unconscious fixations and anxieties — they often have histories of pain that they are trying to escape from and whenever they enter into an intimate relationship all of those complexities come into play. Patterns of pain get activated in intimate relationships in completely unpredictable ways. When evolutionary psychologists say that a couple doesn’t get along because of gender differences that seems absurd because any two people may have trouble getting along simply because they are two different people.

If you follow the reasoning of evolutionary psychology to its logical conclusion, you’ll end up at the basic conclusion that gay and lesbian couples never misunderstand each other because they have the same gender. If gender is what is causing relational troubles, then by this logic, only straight people have relationship problems — and I’m pretty sure that’s not the case.

Much of evolutionary psychology regards homosexuality as an “evolutionary glitch” — and you suggest that theories of queer sexuality are better off as a result. Why is that?

[Laughs] Let me just preface this by saying that part of what is heartbreaking for me about this book is that it is a very straight book in that it focuses on heterosexual relationships. As I say in the introduction, evolutionary psychology itself is so focused on heterosexual relationships that it is difficult to bring anything having to do with the queer into the discussion. This is because they view homosexuality as “an evolutionary dead-end” (their wording) in the sense that it doesn’t lead to reproduction. Because the entire point of evolutionary psychology is to argue that everything about human behavior can be explained by the reproductive urge! I always find that really amusing as an argument because most people I know are trying not to get pregnant when they are having sex!

Queer studies is so far from evolutionary argumentation that it is definitely a blessing. There are some evolutionary biologists who have written books from a queer-friendly perspective, like Joan Roughgarden from Stanford. She is a transwoman whose take on evolutionary biology is completely different from the other works I had read. She talks about the proliferation of sexual possibility and mocks her fellow scientists for the stereotypes they are perpetuating. So there are people who are in evolutionary biology (not psychology) who are questioning the dominant paradigm.

But queer studies has stayed away from engaging with evolutionary psychology precisely because there is this understanding that it is such a toxic modality of trying to understand gender and sexuality. In that sense, it is a kind of blessing, because queer studies has been able to think about and theorize queer sexuality in ways that are so incredibly complicated, wonderful, innovative, and imaginative. They are not shackled to gender norms that insist on stereotypes and polarities.

You talk about the origins of this book coming from a blog post you wrote for Psychology Today about older women or “cougars” dating younger men. Can you tell us about the reception that post got?

Oh my god, I was flabbergasted. Psychology Today is a quasi-academic site, so I headed into it thinking I was going to be engaging with people who were used to having somewhat academic or intellectual debates. I posted this piece on cougars that was just supposed to be fun, a piece about women who like to have sex with younger men for a variety of reasons, one of which is that some younger men are not caught up in these archaic gender stereotypes.

What I didn’t realize is that there are tons of evolutionary psychologists who read Psychology Today and they came at me with everything they had. In their minds, anyone who is not a scientist has no right to talk about relationships or human sexuality (of course at this point I had written two books on love). But what really pissed them off was the idea that any woman would have sex for any reason other than reproduction. Evolutionary psychology’s explanation for why older women are having sex with younger men is that they are trying to beat menopause, like, “maybe if I shag this guy I can get pregnant and everything will be golden.” My argument was to say, older women might be having sex with younger men because a lot of younger guys are gender liberated, but also because younger guys are kind of hot, and they have hard bodies, and sex is kinda fun with them? The response was just scathing. The idea that an older woman could be having sex for pleasure was, to these readers, the most scandalous thing I could have possibly said. They made it known that this was unacceptable and unscientific.

And so you’re like, “I’m going to write a book that’s going to burn this all down!”

[Laughing] I got so mad, I was like “who the fuck do you think you are?” Then around the same time, Satoshi Kanazawa wrote a piece for Psychology Today about how evolutionary psychology “proves” that black women are less attractive than other women. I was outraged. He thought he had evolutionary psychological “justifications” for this argument. Psychology Today did pull the piece, but not before a feminist website saw and reposted it with a scathing commentary.

Those two things together — that they attacked me so viciously, and then this blatantly racist piece about black women — made me so angry that I decided to write this book. Of course, I know that when this book comes out I’m going to get that response multiplied by ten thousand. It only makes it more worthwhile to have written it.

Well, they deserve your takedown. People like Robert Wright and Jonathan and Tiffani Gottschall talk — in their minds “scientifically” — about the “reproductive benefits of rape.” How are they even able to mask an argument as repulsive as this as science?

They believe that this kind of thinking is objective science and there is absolutely no room for leeway. So they will say things like “we know these arguments about rape are going to be offensive to a lot of people, but that’s their problem, because we are doing real science and we have the truth behind our arguments. These other people are just being softhearted liberals who can’t tolerate the hard facts about human life.”

Evolutionary psychology routinely goes to certain primates for examples of how human beings also behave. Their stock examples are the bonobos, chimpanzees, and the orangutans. In terms of evolutionary development, the chimps and the bonobos are actually closer to human beings than orangutans, and so usually psychologists will go to the first two species to explain human behavior. But when it comes to sexual behaviors, they go to the orangutans because in their culture there is a lot of rape. The orangutans are structured in such a way that there is one alpha male who gets to have sex with all the women, and there are many instances where the women are resisting and the men are taking them by force. The bonobos’ society is one where everyone is having rampant sex all the time with everyone — they are non-monogamous, they have multiple partners, women have sex with other women, they masturbate — they are sexual creatures in every way. Rape is just not a part of their culture. So for some enigmatic reason, when evolutionary psychologists start talking about human sexuality they often go to the orangutangs as the example group. “This is natural, this is how it is in the animal kingdom” — ignoring the more gender egalitarian behaviors of the bonobos and the chimps.

The other argument that they turn to is that women who are raped get pregnant more often than women who are not raped (what factors these studies take into consideration is unclear). This is supposedly logical argumentation for why rape is to quote directly from evolutionary psychology: “a successful reproductive strategy.”

Ultimately what is behind these arguments is the idea that female sexuality is always reluctant — there’s this idea that it is in men’s nature to try to overcome this resistance and it’s an evolutionary advantage to do so because that ensures that their genes will be passed on. Because remember: the only thing that matters is that your genes get passed on to the next generation and that they get distributed as widely as possible!

Partly, this kind of argument comes from absurdly traditional modes of thinking that, as you say, “have gone largely unchallenged since Darwin.” Is this Darwin’s legacy?

That’s one of the really infuriating things — I consider Darwin among the greatest thinkers of Western history. His work was groundbreaking. At the same time, like every other thinker in the nineteenth century, he was unable to transcend the gender climate (of Victorian England). Those of us in the humanities have learned to approach these thinkers with a grain of salt every time they begin to talk about women specifically, precisely because we understand that even really brilliant thinkers took false steps because they could not see past their culture. So when we read Nietzsche or Freud or earlier thinkers like Hegel, or going further back to Plato, we understand that though they are brilliant minds, when it comes to gender they are not that great. I think the same is true of Darwin.

I am grateful for his work, and it’s not like I’m saying I don’t believe in evolutionary theory! I’m an atheist and I don’t believe in any other way of coming into the world other than evolution. What is mysterious is the degree to which contemporary evolutionary psychologists are not able to dissociate the Darwinian legacy that is intelligent and wonderful from the specific things he had to say about gender. You don’t have to buy absolutely everything the man had to say to understand that he was a groundbreaking thinker.

There’s also this contradiction in contemporary evolutionary psychology where writers will say that they understand that Darwin was not right when he spoke about gender, but then they will still go on to use his arguments about gender. The argument assumes that Victorian culture was the closest we’ve ever come to the evolutionary truth about men and women. It was a culture where women were coy and reticent and reserved and men were the household patriarchs who got to have mistresses on the side. That’s the golden age because it reflects “evolutionary reality” — everything since then has just been a corruption of evolutionary reality. So our contemporary interest in gender equality is its antithesis and a step backward from what human behaviors should be like.

You argue that gender profiling is so endemic in our society that we no longer recognize it as a form of prejudice. Why does such stereotypical thinking still persist in an age when political correctness seems to reign? In your mind, why is it that gender prejudice goes largely unchecked?

Well that’s sort of my question in the book! I’m like, how is it possible that this rampant gender stereotyping continues when we are reluctant to use other forms of stereotypical thinking? There are still people in our society who rely on racial profiling and stereotypes, but at least they are not usually proud of it. But when it comes to questions of gender, these evolutionary psychologists and a lot of self-help authors are incredibly proud that this is what they are doing. They think that this is actually the truth about men and women and they are just enlightening the rest of us.

So my question in the book is precisely, why is it that gender is the exception to our otherwise anti-stereotypical modality of thinking? I don’t really have a great answer because that is the enigma I was trying to figure out. But I do think it has to do with the fact that women are much more willing to go along with this whole process of being stereotyped than other groups. A lot of women seem perfectly okay and even happy to be stereotyped precisely because they think they can gain some insight. Not usually into themselves, but into the “opposite sex.” They think if they can understand gender in these terms then they will understand how men function and once they figure that out, they can have good relationships and a happily ever after, which we all know is totally not true.

The argument of the final chapter of this book is that evolutionary psychology is feeding a very particular romantic culture that is based on a gender bifurcated heterosexual paradigm, where, if you can figure out how gender functions through these stereotypes than you can have better, more harmonious relationships. I think this is a terror tactic in some ways. Evolutionary psychologists and self-help authors who are walking the same line of reasoning are basically giving women the message that if they do not abide by these stereotypes they will not be loved. This is a very powerful threat. Most of us want to be loved, so what ends up happening is that even women who are feminists, who feel liberated, who have powerful careers and educations still think that they have to perform their gender in specific ways in order to be loved. It’s a very powerful incentive.

It’s a threat of being unloved that is being held over women and it is heartbreaking to me in the sense that it works. Even in a society where many women are aspiring to otherwise egalitarian lives, they still feel like they can’t afford to not be loved or desired — and there’s pretty much nothing as powerful as that in terms of making people stick to the program.

Is it always on the shoulders of women to improve their position in society? Is the onus always on them when there are all kinds of structural and systemic ways in which they are meant to perform this very circumscribed idea of gender? Is this just another way of saying, “Well, it’s on you women, to not eat this up?”

I see what you’re saying. I mean, I would never want to imply that. One of the reasons I wrote this book was to raise consciousness about this problem. I think in many ways women are not aware that this is an insidious part of the establishment that has a vested interest in setting the clock back in a way. This is so not objective science! The idea that this is objective science is the most laughable thing I’ve ever heard. But I don’t think that the average woman on the street is aware of the extent to which this is completely not scientific. I wrote the book in the hope that some women would read it and become aware of the problem in a way that they hadn’t been before.

Of course, that is not nearly enough in being able to demolish the whole systemic nature of this establishment. Something would have to happen on the side of the science itself — and I do see some small signs for hope that things are shifting.

Overall, the question is about social change. I would never want to say that the onus is on women to do it. At the same time, we can almost be certain that nothing will ever happen if women don’t first become aware of the problem and then start complaining. This is maybe the thing I am hoping the book will accomplish: I want women to complain more about this. It is really strange to me that women are so meek in the face of this kind of stereotyping in a way that other groups are not meek about being stereotyped. I’m just like “complain! Raise hell!” Just be really angry! And perhaps if that happens, something will change. I think a lot of younger women are already resisting, and some older women of course always have. So I don’t know what the answer is, but I’m hoping that some women will read the book and become appropriately angry.

Amen.

The Age of Scientific Sexism is forthcoming June 2015.

Julia Cooper is managing editor of cléo, a journal of film and feminism.